Donna Hill!! Thank you so much for your time, and agreeing to interview
with us. Readers please sit back and enjoy our interview with the award winning, literary icon, and best-selling author Donna Hill.

TRM: What’s a typical day like for Donna Hill?

Donna: My day for lack of a better word is hectic! I’m generally up at six am, to ensure that my son is up and about and getting ready for school(he’s graduating from high school this year. So proud of him!!). Then I start getting ready for work. Some mornings (especially recently) I drop my grandson off at the babysitter and then come to work. (my daughter has to be to work at 6 am) I’m usually at my desk around 9-9:30 am. I put in eight hours behind the desk… but I do find time to squeeze in facebook, twitter, email, and some writing along with a desk full of work. I’m generally heading home around 6. I take the bus so that I can unwind for about a half hour and do some reading. Get home, start dinner, read, do my school work and alternate between school writing and novel writing. When I get close to the weekend, if it’s a weekend that I teach, I have to also prepare for class. I try to get in the bed by 11, watch the news or hopefully an episode of Criminal Minds!

TRM: When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

Donna: I’d always written… something. And I mean always, from when I was a little kid. Then as an adolescent I wrote poetry and love letters for my girlfriends to give to their boyfriends. But when I was growing up, being a writer wasn’t a profession, especially for a black person. It wasn’t until I was in my late (very late) twenties that I sort of had an awakening after coming home from church. I went there and prayed on it, asking what was I to do with this “thing” that consumed me all the time. After church I came home and wrote my very first short story “The Long Walk” (on a typewriter!) and sent it off to Black Romance Magazine, and Nathasha Brooks Harris published it. That was in 1987. And the rest as they say is history.

TRM: Romance was your first genre of choice. Why is that?

Donna: Actually, romance happened for me quite by accident. I was a mystery, murder, espionage and mayhem reader. I wrote my first romance because I gotten my writing feet wet writing short romance stories for the confession magazines. So romance kind of chose me, which is why I often have some dead body in my romances! LOL. So I was really thrilled in 2000 when I got to write my first real woman’s fiction novel, IF I COULD, which led to RHTHMS, AN ORDINARY WOMAN, IN MY BEDROOM, DIVAS INC., GETTING HER, GUILTY PLEASURE, WICKED WAYS and most recently WHAT MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME, the conclusion to Rhythms.

TRM: To date how many books do you have published?

Donna: Wow, it’s over sixty.

TRM: How many books have you completed in one year?

Donna: The most so far was five.

TRM: You’re a busy lady. You hold a full-time job, have a family, and your always on the road attending different literary events. When do you fit time in to write?

Donna: I write at every opportunity: in the middle of my day, during transit, at night, when I travel. And now that I am back in school for my Masters, I have even more reading and writing to do.

TRM: Your characters, are they mirrored from family and friends?

Donna: Hmmm, some of them are bits and pieces of people that I know: mannerisms, maybe an incident in their life, their profession. But there is no one character that I can pick from one of my books and say “that’s definitely so-n-so.”

TRM: Tell us about “WHAT MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME” your latest release.

Donna: Oh man, it is a book that was a long time coming. When I wrote Rhythms back in 2001 I very much thought that it was “the end.” But throughout the years, readers have continued to ask for more. When I looked back over the storyline, I saw where I could build a story. I knew the centerpiece would be Parris, but the story had to be bigger than her. So I began to think of my underlying theme and that theme became mothers and daughters and the powerful impact that a mother has on her daughter and the woman she becomes. Once I decided on that, I knew where I wanted to take the story. The reader will follow Parris, Celeste and Leslie as they embark on a journey of self-discovery, pain and healing and perhaps forgiveness as they come to grips with their relationships with their mothers. This is a book that EVERYONE can identify with. We all have mothers and not matter what our relationship with her is, she in some way helped to form the person that we became.

TRM: Who are some of your favorite authors, and do they influence your work at all?

Donna: Bernice McFadden is one of my all time favorites. Carleen Brice, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Gaines, Diane McKinney Whetstone, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Colin Channer, the list goes on.

TRM: What would you like to tell your readers?

Donna: Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting me alllll of these years. It is because of readers that I am celebrating my 20th anniversary. And please, if you go in a bookstore and the book that you want is not there, don’t walk out. Ask them to order the book for you. Two copies! If they don’t know there is a demand for a book, they disappear. You, the reader can keep your favorite authors on the shelf and in print!

TRM: How can they contact Donna Hill?

Donna: They can reach me on facebook, on my website donnahill.com, and by emailing me at dhassistant@gmail.com

Thank you again for taking time out of your busy to schedule to interview with The Review. I wish you continued success!

Kenyatta Ingram
The Review Magazine