Eric Jerome Dickey

A New York Times best-selling author, Eric Jerome Dickey is best known for his novels about contemporary African American life.

He is the author of 15 books, which have appeared on bestseller lists from BlackBoard to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Recent works include Walking with Enemies, Pleasure, Dying for Revenge, and Storm, a re-imagined graphic novel about the X-Men comic heroine. His latest novel is Resurrecting Midnight.

Dickey got his start taking creative writing classes, avidly consuming the works of his favorite authors. He then began to shape a writing career of his own. Having written several comedy scripts for his personal comedy act, he started writing poetry and short stories. “The film work gave me insight into character development, the acting classes helped me understand motivation…All of it goes hand in hand,” Dickey explains.

He joined the International Black Writers and Artists (IBWA), participated in their development workshops, and became a recipient of the IBWA SEED Scholarship to attend UCLA’s Creative Writing classes. In 1994, his first published short story, “Thirteen,” appeared in the IBWA’s River Crossing: Voices of the Diaspora—An Anthology of the International Black Experience. A second short story, “Days Gone By,” was published in the magazine, A Place to Enter.

With those successes behind him, Dickey decided to fine-tune some of his earlier work and developed a screenplay titled, Cappuccino. The film was directed and produced by Craig Ross, Jr. and appeared in coffeehouses around the Los Angeles area. In February 1998, Cappuccino made its local debut during the Pan African Film Festival at the Magic Johnson Theater in Los Angeles.

Short stories, however, did not seem to fulfill Dickey’s creative yearnings – every time he would set out to do a ten-page story, it would go on for hundreds. Dickey continued to write and promote his work for almost three years until he finally got an agent. “Then a door opened,” Dickey says. “And I put my foot in before they could close it.” And that door has remained opened as Dickey’s novels have placed him on the map as one of the best writers of contemporary urban fiction.

Dickey’s book signing tours for Sister, Sister, Friends and Lovers, Milk in My Coffee, Cheaters, and Liar’s Game took him from coast to coast and helped propel each of these novels to #1 on the BlackBoard Bestsellers List. Cheaters was named “BlackBoard Book of the Year” in 2000, and that same year, Dickey celebrated the French publication of Milk in My Coffee by embarking on a book tour to Paris, where the book soon became a bestseller. Dickey’s novels, Liar’s Game, Between Lovers, Thieves’ Paradise, The Other Woman, Naughty or Nice, Drive Me Crazy, and Genevieve have all earned him the success of a spot on The New York Times bestseller list. Liar’s Game and Thieves’ Paradise have also given Dickey the added distinction of being nominated for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Fiction in 2001 and 2002.

In January 2001, Dickey was a contributor to New American Library’s anthology Got To Be Real: Four Original Love Stories, also a BlackBoard Bestseller. His books have held steady positions on regional bestseller lists and have been featured in many publications, including Essence, USA Today, Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Post, and Publishers Weekly.