Veronica Chambers Changed My Life :: Personal Narrative essay about myself

Veronica domiciliate Changed My life   African-American author Veronica Chambers, whose May 1997 de besides memoir Mamas young lady is a New York best-seller, characterizes her spellrs life as roses above thorns. The roses are above, but theres always thorns underneath. Sometimes the work is pleasant, but its usually thorny. Chambers unearthed her endowment fund through a tumultuous childhood and adolescence to emerge as a promising young writer and accomplished journalist.   She is a former editor in chief at The New York Times Magazine and Premiere Magazine. A commonplace contributor to Essence, The New York Times appropriate review and The Los Angeles Times book review, she is the coauthor, with John Singleton, of Poetic Justice. Chambers holds a Freedom Forum companionship at Columbia University. Her intensely personal encounter with Tupac Shakur, the L.A. rapper who was gunned set ashore almost a year ago, appeared in Esquire.   Harlem Renaissance, Chambe rss latest young adults book, willing be released in fall 1997. Slated for spring 98 is another book, Marisol and Magdalena.   While hoodwink a demanding professional schedule, Chambers devotes herself to volunteer work teaching opus to New York City public school children.   Working with those children is like existing for me, says the 27- year-old writer.   Some of their writings are heartbreaking as they wrestle with problems of identification, adolescence, communication, rape, inner-city military force and drugs. They desperately seek role models, and whether I like it or not, they calculate to me to guide them.   Working primarily with immigrant students--a New York City report late classified the citys population as 51% nonwhite due to record newcomers--Chambers asks students to write about their personal lives for each other. Knowing many feel alienated, Chambers points out that shared loneliness can become a character of strength. While her studen ts see only her success, Chambers sees in them the reflection of her disruptive childhood.   It is her saga of survival and triumph that Chambers--the Brooklyn- bred daughter of a Panamanian mother and Dominican-American father-- chronicled in Mamas Girl.   Her Riverhead Books editor, Julie Grau, says, When I first met her, she was impossibly young, but already possessed a maturity because she had lived and overcome a difficult childhood. I liked her because she was so fresh and unpretentious.   Chamberss openness is exceptional considering the trauma she must have suffered at 10 years old when her father abandoned the family--setting in action years of bitter struggle.