Greenburgh Public Library Blog

Urban Fiction: Teri Woods

Urban Fiction.The settings are gritty and the characters are tough, ready to survive by any means necessary. You may know the stories, but what about the authors who write them? What inspired them? Let's take a deeper look at the second of our six authors and offer you a peek inside their lives! ​

To read more about other Urban Fiction authors, check out our previous post about Zane.  ​

1. Being a writer wasn’t Teri Woods’ first career choice. For eight years she was a paralegal in a Philadelphia Center City law firm, practicing in defense litigation for a national insurance company.
2.  Her inspiration for her writing comes from where she grew up. Teri was raised in West Philadelphia in the mid eighties where she states, “drug trafficking was abundant —everyone I knew was either dead or in jail, a lot of the male figures. This inspired me to write “True to the Game.”
3.  Although her first novel, True To The Game, became a hit, it wasn’t overnight. After being rejected from over 20 publishers, Teri took things into her own hands self publishing hand-made books and sold them out of her car. She’s made approximately 1 million dollars just from selling books from her trunk.
4. Event after 20 publisher rejections, two of Terri's best selling novels are set to be feature films. True to the Game was released in theaters on September 8th, 2017. The movie rights to Dutch were acquired in 2015 but has yet to start filming. 
5. Teri appears in the documentary, Behind Those Books, giving viewers an inside look on the urban fiction genre. The film, “The film chronicles the evolution of the gritty street tale through interviews with pioneer authors, publishers, industry insiders, fans, activists, hip hop artists, book clubs, editors, literary agents and vendors.”

To read more about Teri Woods, check out one of her many novels, available at the Greenburgh Public Library. Come in and visit the Urban Fiction section on the second floor! 

References:
http://heragenda.com/power-agenda/teri-woods/
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/world/americas/23iht-23fiction.17184899.html
http://www2.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=368891
http://www.indiewire.com/2014/12/film-adaptations-of-teri-woods-bestsellers-true-to-the-game-dutch-set-to-begin-filmming-in-2015-156551/