Crack City

Renay Jackson, long-time custodian for the Oakland Police Department, discovered his talent for writing while helping his daughter with a writing assignment for school. In the beginning, Jackson's only true believer was himself. Five books later, he has thousands of fans and plenty of plots in his head for new novels. Jackson's books fall into the hip-hop genre, also called "ghetto lit" and "urban lit". They are full of sex, violence, and drugs. Jackson's readership is mostly African American, but he feels that his books have a multi-ethnic appeal. It's just a matter of reaching out to other groups and getting name recognition outside of his regular circles of readers. Jackson says he "tells it how it is," and his readers agree. Renay is the 2002 winner of the Chester Himes Award, the top prize at the annual Chester Himes Black Mystery Writers Conference.