This is the story of a man, a woman, two books — and two plates of jerk chicken. Late one Sunday afternoon at the Fusion Café, Houston-based authors Jetola Anderson-Blair and Troy Martin are eating their Caribbean delicacies with pride. Both have recently, and independently, released debut books, and they’re about to take part in “Up-and-Coming African-American Authors 2000,” an evening of readings and discussions with black Houstonian essayists, novelists and other published scribes. They’re proud, but they’re also hopeful — hopeful that Afrocentric bibliophiles will take serious interest in both them and the event.

“If you have these hundreds and hundreds of black authors who are putting out quality work,” Martin says, “and I stress the term ‘quality,’ then why not make it known that, hey, just because you’ve read the latest novel by the big-name author, you have another book — you have all these other books — that you can still read.”

Anderson-Blair picks up the thought: “Some people, they only want to read people they’ve heard of. And so, if they’ve never heard of you, then you have to make it possible to dig up interest in your work.”

Keeping the interest shouldn’t be a problem for these authors; their books are highly engaging. Anderson-Blair’s collection of inspirational essays, In My Sister’s Shoes, takes the most mundane minutia and spins from it an optimistic commentary on human behavior. In Dazed & Confused: Surviving Life in the Game, Martin tells the first-person story of a fresh-outta-college black corporate professional who has to deal with company politics, relationships and his own machismo.

But for now, they’re waiting for local word-of-mouth to reach a buzz and then spread beyond Houston’s city limits. “You work from where you are and expand,” Anderson-Blair explains. “But a lot of people … think you’re supposed to write a book and then be on the New York Times best-seller list the next day, and it doesn’t work like that.”

“You have to appreciate the struggle,” says Martin. “And really … you almost have to look at the struggle as a blessing in itself, because the struggle is what ultimately propels you into the success that you are trying to attain for yourself.”

“Up & Coming African-American Authors 2000” is Saturday, February 19, at 7 p.m. Barnes & Noble, 3003 West Holcombe, (713)349-0050. Free.

This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2000.