After a season: the book credited with igniting the urban genre, Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever, is back in a collector's edition.

If in the year 1999 you were a literary connoisseur looking for a masterpiece in the likes of books such as Toni Morrison's Beloved or Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sister Soujah's The Coldest Winter Ever may have seemed as appealing as a plate of greasy rib-tips to a vegetarian. If you were like many people who were just looking for a new read or an amazing ride, Sister Souljah's story hit the spot.

Often noted as the spark that set the fire, The Coldest Winter Ever can easily be classified as consummate "Mother" of the genre now known as "urban-lit." When it was first published, the story opened the door to a very well-known world that few had the gall or desire to write about.

The Coldest Winter Ever, the story of Winter Santiaga, whose alluring attitude was story enough by itself, was the emergence of something that followers and new recruits to hip-hop culture had been waiting for. It was also exactly what publishers and booksellers needed to excite and rejuvenate the literary interests of some African American readers in America's metropolises. Sister Souljah's novel created a legacy and became the footprint in the sand of many stories in the same vein to follow: Books like Shannon Holmes's B-More Careful (2001) Erica Kennedy's Bling (Miramax, 2004) and Vickie Stringer's Let That Be the Reason (A&B Distributors, 2002) can attribute a large part of their success and inspiration to Sister Souljah for taking the first step into the formerly silent streets of literature's ghettos and back alleys.

In April of 1999, Simon & Schuster's Atria division published and sold an amazing one-million copies of Sister Souljah's first leap into the world of fiction. The star character, Winter Santiaga, and her experiences had a strikingly profound effect on audiences. From the youngest teenager to the 40-year-old, readers were awestruck by Souljah's ability to fill the pages with such brutal truth and reality. In The Coldest Winter Ever, the Bronx--born author gave the streets of New York a brand-new voice, and they screamed at a volume previously unrealized in the literary world.

Now, more than five years later, The Coldest Winter Ever has been rereleased in a Special Collectors Edition by Atria Books (October 2004, $21.95, ISBN 0-743-49938-7). Adorned with the same vibrantly colored cover, the new edition became available to an eager audience just this past year. In a read as satisfying as before, the Special Collector's Edition includes commentary by Sister Souljah that answers questions--Which character did you create first? What were you trying to achieve with the novel The Coldest Winter Ever?--many of her fans have been asking since their first read.

Souljah also explains some of the symbolism behind different parts of the story, her analysis of the characters Midnight and Winter, and what led her to the point of departure from which she derived her resounding tale of ghetto-life and all its unnerving intricacies.

In Souljah's story, she illustrates the often-unforgivable life of the daughter of a drug kingpin who 'always made sure to take good care of his family until the law snatches him into its lock-safe clutches. Along the course of her solo redemption, Winter attempts to re-identify herself in the streets of Brooklyn--and to reclaim her status as a sympathetic diva. Her life-changing story is permanently etched onto the pages of history in The Coldest Winter Ever, and with the new edition, readers can relish the story of the coldest Winter ever and the winds that blew her into our lives forever.

Arin M. Lawrence is a freelance writer in New York City.