Still Rising: Janet Cheatham Bell

Janet Cheatham Bell has been engaged in research, teaching, and writing to help correct distortions about Americans of African descent since 1968. In 1984 she left her position as a textbook editor to become a consultant to the book publishing industry and to publish her own books.

Cheatham's first two books, Famous Black Quotations and Some Not So Famous and Famous Black Quotations on Women, Love and Other Topics were self-published in 1986 and 1992. In 1994 she licensed the publishing rights to Warner Books, whose Famous Black Quotations was published in 1995. Within the next seven years Bell had nine books of quotations on the market. In 2013, she was cited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. on national television as “a pioneer in doing books of black quotations.”

Bell has also written a collection of essays, Victory of the Spirit, published by Warner in 1996. In 2007, her coming-of-age story, The Time and Place That Gave Me Life, was published by Indiana University Press. Bell revived Sabayt Publications, her self-publishing imprint, in 2011 for a second essay collection, Not All Poor People Are Black. A second memoir, Mixed Marriage was published with Sabayt Publications in 2018. Still Rising: Famous Black Quotations for the 21st Century (Agate Publishing) is her fifteenth book.

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