Novelist, Whose Family Hails From Baltimore, Pays Tribute to the Late Elijah Cummings

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA, November 1, 2019 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Dr. James E. Shaw is a university psychology professor who, since 2003, also serves on the Panel of Experts of the Los Angeles Superior Court. Shaw is an author perhaps best known by the nation's media for his much-heralded nonfiction book, JACK AND JILL, WHY THEY KILL (2000). That book was based on his four years of doctoral research inside state youth prisons. The centerpieces of his research were adolescent girls and boys sentenced to "juvenile life" (until age 25) for having committed acts of homicide and murder. In addition to graduating with his Ph.D. (Claremont Graduate University), Shaw was also a winner of Phi Delta Kappa's "Best Dissertation of the Year" award for his ground-breaking research.

Shaw says, "The idea for my novel, LADY BALTIMORE (Amazon/Kindle Publishing), was driven by the real-life backgrounds and odysseys--from life at home to life in prison--of the youths who volunteered to be the subjects of my four-year research project." Shaw adds, "Amid my wife's and my rearing our family, for years I could not get my research out of my mind." So, Shaw decided to write a "potboiler, a turbulent, action-adventure love story with a happy ending, wherein the heroine, re-inspired by her religious roots, generously gives back to her community and funds charities." He names his novel LADY BALTIMORE to "not only describe the life of my heroine who, after serving her time in youth prison, emerges to form an internationally popular Hip Hop group, Lady Baltimore, but also to purposefully enshrine and positively re-frame Baltimore, Maryland, in the wake of President Trump's August 2019 brain-less, vitriolic verbiage against one of the nation's historic and foundational cities." Shaw's wife has relatives who hail from Baltimore, Maryland. Shaw says, "it is important that America be reminded that renowned personages are, or were, Baltimoreans: The late Congressman Elijah Cummings, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, Senator Nancy Pelosi, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, actor David Hasselhoff, Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, rapper Tupac Shakur, and TV celebrity Jim Henson and his Muppets, to name but a few. Moreover, the myth-inspiring horses, Sea Biscuit and Man O' War, were born, raised, and raced, in Baltimore."

But Shaw says he wants "much more" from his 572-page novel than book sales. "I want to encourage and motivate other writers and creative artists to look at our fine United States of America and choose cities in which to set their stories. One positive way to confront such slander from an apparently chronically unhappy, lost and increasingly confused President--due, possibly, to his over-exposure to growing swamp gases he has promised, for the past 3 years, to rid the nation of--is for writers, artists, and celebrities to answer slander with their creative gifts." In addition to setting their stories in "ignored and verbally-slurred cities," Shaw asks creative artists to find other ways to "give and grow those cities, just as foresters and farmers do, when a tree is bending from ill winds." Shaw says that some of the proceeds from the sales of LADY BALTIMORE "will be donated to the Baltimore City Branch of the NAACP; Morgan State University; ACLU Foundation of Maryland; Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore; and the American Breast Cancer Foundation."

James E. Shaw
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