New York Times best-selling author and 'CSI: NY' star Hill Harper’s inclination to advocate literacy amongst today’s youth resulted in his 2006 best-seller “Letters To A Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny” and its 2008 follow up “Letters To A Young Sister: DeFine Your Destiny.”
Next month the Brown University grad will continue his pursuit to uplift aspiring writers during Anguilla’s first annual Literary Festival.
During a recent interview with the Huffington Post, Harper opened up on his involvement with the festive five-day event, his interest in adapting his book “The Conversation” into a motion picture, and his forthcoming as-yet-untitled tome.
How important would you consider an event such as the Anguilla Literary Festival to take place in the Caribbean?
I’m looking forward to it. Whenever there’s an opportunity to celebrate the written word and celebrate the folks that read the written word, and I think to encourage other writers to write and encourage folks to read more and get connected to it in a personal way, it’s a positive thing. There’s a lot of festivals in the islands that involve music, so it’s high time and I think welcome time to have a literary festival.
Are you planning on utilizing any of the motivational messages that you provided in your “Letters To A Young Brother/Sister” series?
At the end of the day for me self-esteem building and confidence building is the foundation for anything that we do, whether you want to be a writer, a painter, or a entrepreneur. So the book starts with those fundamentals and I’m going to speak to those when I’m there and speak to this idea that runs through my book, it’s called “Being An Active Architect” of your own life, and we’re going to go deeper into those subjects. So I just encourage folks who enjoy reading to come on down to Anguilla for the festival. I think it’s going to be incredible. I also think when you have Terry McMillan and all these other wonderful writers, who have done wonderful things, it’s going to be a great time to have intimate up close conversations. Often times it’s big book signings and discussions, people move through pretty quickly and you shake a hand and get a book signed. But obviously in this type of atmosphere it’s going to be a more intimate environment where folks can really have longer conversations all these great authors.
For your next publication what are some of the themes that you’re aiming to use.
My next book that I’m working on is a book about emancipation incarceration crisis and how it affects individuals, and how to stop recidivism. I haven’t announced the title as of yet, but obviously the same type of themes that were in the “Letters to a Young Sister/Young Brother” book would be in a book like that.
If you had to choose any of your books to adapt into a motion picture which one would it be?
I want to do a movie based on my book “The Conversation.” “The Conversation” seems to be folks favorite book out of all my books. It’s about relationships, and I guess it’s the most salacious and fun, so that would be the book that I would love to make a movie about. I think this movie, “Think Like A Man” is going to do quite well. And I think the conversation takes those primacies to a different level in terms of how men and women actually interact and the dysfunction and entertaining aspect around that as well.
Are you working on any other projects?
We’re still doing “CSI: NY.” We have the last couple of weeks of that airing and then I’m working on a movie coming up called “1982” that I’m going to be shooting in Philadelphia in June. And I’m really looking forward to that. It’s about the introduction of crack-cocaine into the community in Philadelphia, which happened in 1982, it’s a period piece. The hope is for it to go to Sundance Film Festival and then get a release date after that.
WATCH: