Touré is a novelist first and a tennis player second. (He keeps telling himself that.) He was born in Boston just before the release of Shaft, when Al Green first sang "I'm so tired of bein alone," and Muhammad Ali was knocked out by Joe Frazier. He spent years in a New England prep school, (beloved Milton!), and then did time at an American university that doesn't deserve to be named. There he fell into protest poetry (if you come across it turn your head immediately!) Determined to expand the complexity of the discussion of Black people, he moved to New York City in 1992, just before the release of the classic Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg album, The Chronic, just after the Clarence Thomas hearings and the L.A. Uprising, and began to write.

He was a lazy, chatty, unpaid intern at Rolling Stone and was fired one day, then given assignments to write record reviews the next. He is now a Contributing Editor there, the author of cover stories on Lauryn Hill, DMX, N' Sync, and Alicia Keys. He learned to write at Rolling Stone, and went on to write for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Playboy, theVillage Voice, Vibe, and Tennis Magazine. In 1996 he went to Columbia University's graduate creative writing program for a year and, thanks to a class by Stephen Koch, began writing fiction. His first piece was the story of Sugar Lips Shinehot, a 1940s Harlem saxophonist who loses his ability to see white people. In the years following Columbia he appeared in The Best American Essays of 1999 and The Best American Sportswriting of 2001. His first book is a collection of short stories called The Portable Promised Land being published by Little, Brown and Company.

He loves Didion, Morrison, Nabokov, Ellison, Rushdie, Joyce, Franzen, Moody, Greg Tate, Garcia Marquez, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. He also loves Sly Stone, Al Green, Jay-Z, Satchmo, D'Angelo, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Eminem, Erykah Badu, Biggie, the Beatles, Prince, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Macy Gray, Rakim, Raekwon, Radiohead, and, of course, Stevie Wonder. He's voted for a Clinton every chance he's had. He loves "Almost Famous" (it's frighteningly real).

Touré is his real name, the name his mother gave him when he was born, the name his parents consciously chose for him. The last name was something that came automatically, like fries with a burger, thus it wasn't something that really meant anything to him. And plus, Touré is a last name in Africa—they laughed at him there, Silly American. Touré ain't no first name. It's kinda like a Bostonian named Kennedy. But in the one-namedness there's a reference to the dislocation implicit in the African-American family name and a reach back to the unknown last names of Africa. His next book,Soul City, a novel that tells the full story of America's most miraculous metropolis, is nearly done. He lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Books by Touré

The Portable Promised Land

by Touré