Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the author of the national bestsellerTumbling. A native of Philadelphia whose father served two terms as a Pennsylvania stare senator, she grew up in a close-knit family with five sisters and one brother, attending public schools and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in English. She is a regular contributor to Philadelphia Magazine and her work has appeared in Essence and the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine; She has received numerous awards, including a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, Discipline Winner in the Pew Fellowship on the Arts, the Zora Neale flurston Society Award for creative contribution to litera-ture, a Citation from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for her portrayal of urban family life as presented in Tumbling, Author of the Year Award from the national Go On Girl Book Club, and more. She has participated regularly in the intensive Rittenhouse Writer's Workshops and reaches fiction writing at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. She lives with her husband, Greg, and teenage twins outside Philadelphia.

Books by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Leaving Cecil Street: A Novel

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Blues Dancing

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

For the last twenty years, slim, dazzling beautiful Verdi Mae has composed a quiet life for herself with her former professor, Rowe. He makes her feel so good, even as stifles her with his care--until, walking home from her cousin Kitt's, Verdi smells butter in the foggy evening air. It is the fragrance of the future beckoning. It is the scent of falling in love. It is also the harbinger of change. Verdi's first love has returned to town: Johnson, the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who captured Verdi's heart when the two of them were in college. Their relationship was unalloyed sweetness until Johnson taught Verdi to love heroin.

Tempest Rising

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone