About
Formerly an attorney, Jean Alicia Elster is the author of the young adult novel How It Happens (Wayne State University Press, 2021) which received a 2021 Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Young Adult Fiction, a 2022 Midwest Book Silver Award—Young Adult Fiction, and the 2022 Bronze Medal in Young Adult Fiction by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. She is the author of the middle grade books Who’s Jim Hines? and The Colored Car (Wayne State University Press), each selected as a Michigan Notable Book in 2009 and 2014, respectively. The Colored Car also received the 2014 Midwest Book Gold Award in Children’s Fiction. She authored these children’s volumes with Judson Press: Just Call Me Joe Joe (2001), I Have a Dream, Too! (2002), I’ll Fly My Own Plane (2002) and I’ll Do the Right Thing (2003). Her essays have appeared in publications including Ms., World Vision, Christian Science Sentinel, and Black Child. A 2017 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, Elster also has garnered three residencies at the Ragdale Foundation.
Featured Work
How It Happens
How It Happens is a story of race relations, miscegenation, sexual assault and class divisions. A continuation of the plots begun in Jean Alicia Elster’s previous upper middle grade novels Who’s Jim Hines? and The Colored Car, How It Happens is written for young adult readers, beginning in the turbulent post-Reconstruction period and ending in the post-World War II industrialized North. An intergenerational story of the lives of three African-American women, Elster intertwines the fictionalized adaptations of the defining periods and challenges in her family’s history as these three women struggle to stake their claim to the American dream.
