Join Ella as she meets one today's hottest authors. Attica Locke discusses Black Water Rising with the Go on Girl President.Attica Locke is a novelist and a screenwriter who has written scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO Films and more. A graduate of Northwestern University, she was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab. Black Water Rising, her first novel, was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award and a 2010 NAACP Image Award. She is currently at work on her second book.

Black Water Rising is a murder mystery that takes place in Houston, Texas, in 1981. It follows the character, Jay Porter, a low rent criminal defense attorney who was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in the late '60s and early '70s and now finds himself trying to transition from the political activism of his youth into the Reagan '80s - a time when the whole country and black people in particular had shifted our focus from political progress to economic progress. At the beginning of the book, Jay saves a woman from drowning and soon gets caught up in a mystery involving this woman and some of the biggest power brokers in the city. And along the way he has to come to terms with the demons of his past: the guns, his FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him.