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Author Lorri Hewitt

Lorri was born in Fairfax, Virginia, but spent most of her childhood in Littleton, Colorado.

Her childhood was for the most part idyllic and uneventful, her father was a system analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and her mother stayed home with Lorri and her younger brother Derek.

Lorri was a highly imaginative kid, spending hours in the imaginary worlds she created from the many books she read. One of her favorite things to do was to write herself into her favorite stories, altering the stories so that instead of Laura Ingalls, Charles-Wallace Murray, Luke Skywalker, or Indiana Jones, she was the principle heroine.

All through her early years at school she was the difficult child, the one who was smart but didn’t apply herself, was continually challenging authority, and constantly daydreaming. Her first serious try to write was at the age of 9. She got the inspiration for the novel from the Little House on the Prairie series. The novel, titled Carlton’s Life, consisted of about 140 pages detailing the adventures of 6-year-old Wendy Carlton, who was not only a pioneer braving the ravages of the
Florida winters in 1843 (at that point Lorri didn’t know much about geography), but also a religious zealot (as in Joan of Arc).

At this time Lorri became seriously involved in ballet training, which made a nice compliment to her writing because in ballet she was able to develop the discipline that would allow her to sustain long writing projects. The first major event in her life occurred when she was eleven and her Aunt Ginger died of cancer. Her parents then took in her eight year old cousin Darnel, and the family had to adjust to having a new member. The change was made even more difficult because Darnel’s biological father, learning that Darnel was to be the recipient of his mother’s life insurance policy, sued the court for custody of Darnel. The next two years were very difficult emotionally and financially for the family, as social workers and lawyers became a regular guest on family life.

Whereas writing had been mainly an amusement before, writing stories became therapeutic and a source of escapism. Her characters began to resemble human beings instead of fantastical adventurers. Although she had in junior high school become a part of the ‘bad crowd,’ her attraction to this crowd was their anger and their rebelliousness. They provided her with a window of observation into the world of teenagers that she had read about in S.E. Hinton books and that she was not, by her relative comfort and her stable family life, a part of.

In these years she was playing the role of counselor to her friends, helping them through parental crises, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, and
Sexual victimization. All of these experiences gave her new ideas for writing. She now became committed to the idea of recording the problems that she saw around her with people her age in a realistic way. Writing was still, however, an extremely private thing for Lorri. Aside from her best friend from childhood Lyda Acker, no one, not even her parents, knew to the extent to which writing was an important part of her life. Her most productive writing period was in her high school years, in which she wrote nine novels.

Her high school years were her most difficult years, because that was when she began to feel alienated. Being ‘different,’ being the only black student in her classes, living in a middle-class neighborhood had never before been problematic for her because she had always been in many ways a leader, someone other kids could look up to. Once she reached high school, being a leader was no longer enough for her. She knew that there was something more to her identity than she was seeing in her daily life. She had no real access to black organizations, had no black friends. Her first thought to deal with this new dilemma for her was to throw herself even more into activities.

At this time ballet had become an important part of her life. She was spending six days a week at the dance studio in serious professional training. She began to feel the first actions of racial discrimination, which she had not faced to age 14 in her ballet company. As she watched herself being passed over for major roles, Lorri began to wonder why it seemed to difficult to have a black Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, and in this way she began to see how tradition was often incompatible with social realities. Lorri actively tried to involve herself in the black community by making friends in the Denver area and becoming active in Shorter African Methodist Episcopal church.

Out of these experiences grew her inspiration for her first published novel titled Coming of Age, which she wrote as a Senior in high school. Unsure of the book’s marketability, she sent the book to only one publisher, Holloway house, a medium-sized publisher of black experience paperbacks. She was surprised to learn in her freshman year at Emory University that the book had been accepted for publication. Lorri was surprised by the amount of publicity surrounding the book and spent her first semester giving many television, radio, newspaper and magazine interviews. This was a rather unnerving experience, as writing, which had always been such a private part of her life, now became public. But the most
enjoyable experiences for her were the visits to several Atlanta high schools, where she talked with students about the process of writing. She was often told by the students, especially by black students, that her book was the first book to get them interested in reading in general. These experiences further emphasized her to focus on the contemporary experiences of young African-Americans and how it was important to her to keep writing for that audience.

Lorri won a merit scholarship to attend Emory University that covered all of her tuition and room and boarding expenses. Because finances were not a big concern for her, she was able to devote her time to many different activities. At Emory, Lorri remained actively involved in the dance community, as well as getting involved in several African American organizations on campus. She had originally thought she would study political science and then go to law school, but she realized in her second year that she had a love of literature and that she wanted to explore that interest further. She became involved in the creative writing program at Emory, winning the undergraduate fiction contest in her freshman year. Her second novel Soulfire grew out of that impetus. The first draft was written during her second year at Emory and explored the issues of black manhood.

Lorri spent the summer between her sophomore and junior year in Europe and the middle East, studying art history and ancient history. She was also able to travel again in the summer of 1993, spending that summer at the university of Oslo’s International Summer School with students from 78 countries. That experience made the most profound impression on her life, as she was able to live in a truly global community. During her final year at Emory she became committed to the idea of spending a year abroad after graduation in order to more fully experience life in another country. She was awarded a Robert Jones fellowship to the University of St. Andrews, which has also offered her the opportunity to travel throughout Europe. She had also received a Fulbright scholarship to Ghana and regrettably had to turn it down because the Fulbright commission does not allow deferrals.

At St. Andrews she is continuing her studies of English. She plans to explore these issues further in graduate school, where she hopes to get a PhD in English and ultimately teaches literature and writing. She is concerned with the fragmentation occurring in the humanities today, especially in the areas in such interdisciplinary fields as cultural studies and woman studies. She plans to investigate the issue, most importantly the implications of the hyper-specialization required by today’s graduate students and tomorrow’s teachers on the undergraduate student, with a fellow Jones scholar and cross over into the field of non-fiction writing. Her current fiction projects include an original play she’s working on, as well as the revision of the short story collection she wrote for her Honor’s thesis at Emory. She plans to begin work on another novel.

She is now a research assistant at the Mid-Continent Regional Education Laboratory in Aurora, Colorado. She is also pursuing a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is at work on her third novel.

Source: http://www.referate10.com/referate/Englisch/18/Alumna-Lorri-Hewetts-Biography-reon.php

Author Lorri Hewitt Lorri was born in Fairfax, Virginia, but spent most of her childhood in Littleton, Colorado. Her childhood was for the most part idyllic and uneventful, her father was a system analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and her mother stayed home with Lorri and her younger brother Derek. Lorri was a highly imaginative kid, spending hours in the imaginary worlds sh... More