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

Veronica Chambers Changed My Life   African-American actor Veronica Chambers, whose May 1997 debut memoir Mamas Girl is a mod York best-seller, characterizes her writers 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 talent through a tumultuous childhood and adolescence to emerge as a promising puppylike writer and accomplished journalist.   She is a former editor at The upstart York Times Magazine and Premiere Magazine. A frequent contributor to Essence, The modern York Times book review and The Los Angeles Times book review, she is the coauthor, with John Singleton, of poetical Justice. Chambers holds a Freedom Forum Fellowship at capital of South Carolina University. Her intensely ain encounter with Tupac Shakur, the L.A. rapper who was gunned down almost a year ago, appeared in Esquire.   Harlem Renaissance, Chamberss latest young adults book , will be released in fall 1997. Slated for spring 98 is another book, Marisol and Magdalena.   While juggling a demanding schoolmaster schedule, Chambers devotes herself to volunteer work teaching writing to New York urban center public school children.   operative with those children is like breathing for me, says the 27- year-old writer.   Some of their books are heartbreaking as they wrestle with problems of identification, adolescence, communication, rape, inner-city violence and drugs. They desperately attempt role models, and whether I like it or not, they look to me to guide them.   Working primarily with immigrant students--a New York City report recently classified the citys universe of discourse 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 share loneliness can become a source of strength. While her students stick out only her success, Chambers sees in them the reflection of her turbulent childhood.   It is her saga of survival and gaiety 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 outset met her, she was impossibly young, but already possessed a maturity because she had lived and chastise a difficult childhood. I liked her because she was so fresh and unpretentious.   Chamberss desolation is exceptional considering the trauma she must have suffered at 10 eld old when her father abandoned the family--setting in motion years of acidulent struggle.