If you haven't heard of urban literature yet, you soon will. It also goes by the name of hip-hop literature and street literature. Urban literature is an emerging genre of both fiction and non-fiction tales that incorporate hip-hop culture. Books written for the urban literature genre are sometimes called " ghetto books," because of the thematic inner-city plight often portrayed in them. Urban literature is a predominately an African-American driven genre for both its writers and readers. But is the rising popularity of urban literature a good thing? The specialized genre of urban lit. is causing quite a bit of debate as to whether it progressive or regressive for African-American culture.

These ghetto books may certainly have serious repercussions on any advancements that have been made in the areas of racism or prejudice toward the African-American community. The biggest issue in the Ghetto books is that are known to often glorify sex, drugs, violence, gangs, and other problems in the African-American community. With titles such as, "All That and a Bag of Chips," "A Hustler's Wife," and "Chocolate Flava," it is not surprising that some African-American literary critiques and scholars are concerned about some of the creative works coming forth from the urban literature genre.

There is no denying the creative influence hip-hop culture has had on the world since it's development in the 70's; particularly in the areas of music and fashion, which have had an overall positive impact on world culture. But I'm not so sure urban literature will leave up to it's successors.

For a closer look at urban literature and publishers of urban literature check out these links: http://www.urbanliterature.com http://www.theurbanbooksource.com http://www.streetfiction.org http://www.vibe.com/tags/The-Urban-Literature-Newbie http://www.northatlanticbooks.com/category/literature/urbanlit http://streetmoneypublishing.com/index.html