The next crop of reading pleasures: your favorite writers are at work, and here's what they're up to. (Summer Escapes).

Spring may be the season for fresh starts, but many top black writers are using this summer as the time to get new books out, give old characters a new spin or take their work in a new direction. Here's a look at what some authors are up to:

Pearl Cleage is working on a novel that gets to the heart of not only family relationships, but also relationships between women. The story focuses on two sisters who are 15 years apart and just beginning to get to know each other. As much as Cleage fills her pages with truth, she also throws in a hit of idealism. She says she gives her characters what she wishes all people had: love.

Meanwhile, her third novel, Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do, is scheduled for release in August. Readers get a taste of utopia when the lead character, a man, makes a safe haven in an Atlanta neighborhood. "It was great to imagine how life would be if we didn't have some of the problems we have," Cleage says. Although for readers as well as the novel's characters, the question that remains is: At what cost?

Count on Cleage to present life as accurately as she can--for better or for worse.

In her 2002 relationship novel Always True to You in My Fashion (HarperCollins), Valerie Wilson Wesley mined the world of the black American elite. But this summer she shifts gears and returns to work on a Tamara Hayle mystery. The series, which follows the adventures of a single mother turned private investigator, also helped Wilson Wesley first strike gold in publishing. "Mysteries, to some extent, are formulaic" Wilson Wesley says. "They don't pose as big a challenge as writing non-mysteries. But I love the Tamara Hayle character and a lot of readers love and enjoy her, too."

When we last left Hayle in The Devil Riding, she had gone undercover in Atlantic City to track a runaway teen. Wilson Wesley won't spill the details about the seventh installment in the series, but she does say that Hayle will be dealing with aging and making peace with the past. In September, Wilson Wesley will also publish another book in her children's series, tentatively titled Willimena Rules, from Hyperion. The story follows an unpredictable and outrageously funny black gift, and is one of the few first-reader books to feature a young African American female character.

With the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark school desegregation case Brown vs. Board of Education coming up next year, constitutional law professor Derrick Bell will be hard at work this summer on a book that will examine the case's history, and why, to a large extent, our hopes that the decision would bring sweeping change have been disappointing. Bell, who has never minced words or principles (in 1990, he resigned from the Harvard Law School faculty--the first tenured black professor--to protest its lack of women of color on the faculty), says that black children are worse off today than they were in 1954. "At least then there was a legal argument to challenge," he says. "Now we're still segregated, but there's nothing under the law that we can do about it." It is this kind of critique that Bell says will set his apart from the more celebratory books likely to flood the shelves in honor of the historic case's anniversary. Besides, as he puts it, "I don't think there are many people still alive who have my experience." Before becoming a part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team and supervising civil rights and school desegregation cases in Mississippi during the 1960s, Bell was one of only three black attorneys in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.

Although he has already written seven books, Bell describes writing as hard. "Trying to express yourself and get it right is a real challenge," he says. "But I wanted to have my say about the Civil Rights Era, to give an understanding of what went wrong and how we can do it better in the future."

Edwidge Danticat is working on a collection of short stories called Our Fathers Who Aren't. The book, which will be published by Knopf in January 2004, deals with the events and aftermath of dictatorial oppression in her native Haiti. All the stories follow a single character: a torturer whose past crimes are hidden beneath his new life in America.

"I grew up under a dictatorship and have always wanted to record the way that this experience follows us throughout life," Danticat explains. "This is my attempt at it." Danticat says that writing this book has been more taxing than her previous projects. "I think the more you write, the deeper you have to dig," she says. "So this book took a lot longer than my other ones. I threw away a lot of pages and revised a lot more. But for better or worse, this is the book that made me a writer."

It's taken best-selling author E. Lynn Harris eight years to complete his memoir, but it hits shelves this July. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted leads readers through Harris's childhood and most painful lessons. "A lot of the fans were curious about how I got here, and I was finally ready to talk about it," Harris says. "And maybe they'll pick up lessons they can use in life" Harris has scheduled a 15-city tour to promote the book.

Ellis Cose has made a career out of probing America's race problems, most recently detailing how they have wounded black men in Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America. Now the Newsweek columnist is turning his gaze international, as he works on a new book that addresses a question captivating countries from Rwanda to South Africa: How to make peace with a past shaped by atrocities? The book, which he'd like to call Taking Back the Past, looks at everything from reconciliation to reparations and will even address forgiveness in a personal sense. Cose says he was struck by how much the issue of the past crept up into topics at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban and was fascinated by the approaches some have taken to address it. The book should be in stores next spring.

Karen Grigsby Bates plans to follow up her 2001 novel Plain Brown Wrapper with the second book in her Alex Powell series. Under the working title Chosen People, the book, much like its predecessor, will examine issues of class and caste in contemporary black America. "It will focus on the social networks that bind and separate us," Bates explains.

Readers can expect the return of several characters, including Alex's best friend, Signe Tucker, and boyfriend Paul Butler, as well as another dead body turning up. The story takes place in Los Angeles, where journalist Alex is assigned to uncover the details surrounding the killing of a controversial author.

Bates, who is also a correspondent for National Public Radio, says this novel has been harder to write than her previous ones because she was much more distracted by her day job, especially given the national and international crises of the past few months. Still, she says that after seeing the issue of class stratification come up in the black community over and over again, she was intrigued to see how volatile the subject is.

"There are still some very real lines of demarcation that some "chosen" black folks have drawn among themselves and those who they perceive as their inferiors," Bates says. "I thought it would be interesting to see what's behind all that and Alex was a good vehicle."

For her latest novel, the third in the Charlotte Justice mystery series, Paula L. Woods gives her heroine and readers a twist unlike any seen in her prior work. Justice, a thirtysomething LAPD homicide detective, investigates the death of a Korean American campaign strategist, and in the process she takes readers through a mix of cultural settings far removed from the black community.

Woods says this has forced her to really think about diversity. "Just like we as black folks object to always being portrayed as gang bangers, drug addicts or prostitutes, I wanted to make sure the Korean Americans I showed in the novel represent a wide array of background and experiences." The novel is scheduled to be in bookstores this fall.

With the number of projects Walter Mosley will be cramming into the next few months, his summer seems far from a time for leisure. When he spoke with BIBR, Mosley was busy with the final edits to the novel The Man in My Basement, due from Little Brown in late December or early January. He was also preparing for an already completed mystery Fear Itself to be published in July.

Mosley has also got his eye on the small screen. He came up with an idea for a TV series about a black private eye named Henry Lee. The pilot was shot in March, but at press time Mosley hadn't yet heard if the series would be picked up for September.

At the same time, the USA cable network is in the initial stages of developing a series of Easy Rawlins movies. "Creating stories about black people--and vehicles for black actors--is a great joy for me," Mosley says. "It's everything my father wished for me and for our potential as a people."

Bronx native Nicole Saunders is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University and an assistant editor at Essence magazine. While she is currently working on a book of short stories, Saunders took time to find out what some writers are working on this summer. Her report begins on page 21.