FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nationwide — Author Jeffery “J. A.” Faulkerson announced the release of his literary anthology J. A. Faulkerson Reader: The Literary Works of a Contemporary, Black Visionary. The book is currently available for online purchase through Amazon.com.
Faulkerson, a former Tennessee State Secondary Athletic Association (TSSAA) long jump champion who graduated from Kingsport’s Dobyns-Bennett High School and the University of Tennessee, always knew he wanted to become a published author. So, when he published his debut novel Adinkrahene: Fear of a Black Planet in 2014, he breathed a sigh of relief. One of his lifelong goals had been achieved. The very next year, Adinkrahene was selected as one of three finalists for a Phillis Wheatley Book Award (in the First Fiction category), requiring him to travel to New York City’s Columbia University for an awards ceremony. He did not claim the top prize that night, but he became more confident in his ability to produce literary works that entertain, educate and enlighten.
Faulkerson’s J. A. Faulkerson Reader contains essays, poems, short stories and books produced over an 11-year period. He shares the trials and the triumphs associated with becoming an author, poet and screenwriter. He admonishes his contemporaries to become compassionate neighbors who have unconditional love and neighborly compassion in their hearts. He gifts adolescents and young adults, i.e., the Young Achievers, with a playbook that connects prosperity to the pursuit of greatness in the areas of Nurturing, Learning, Working and Leading. He reminisces about the five years he spent as his son’s full-time stay-at-home parent, offering fathers and father figures strategies they can use to help their children develop championship mindsets. And his poetry celebrates his Black ancestors’ legacy of activism, community and kinship, how their unrelenting fight for freedom, justice and fairness serves as the perfect model for how citizenries create more perfect unions.
The J. A. Faulkerson Reader was published on October 17, 2025, and is 523 pages long.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. A. Faulkerson is a Northern Virginia-based Author, Poet and Screenwriter. Many of his writings pay homage to the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, individuals he calls compassionate neighbors because they were led by the unconditional love and neighborly compassion in their hearts. He also has a heart for youth, evidenced by his years of service as a TRIO Upward Bound and YMCA Youth director. Through his written and spoken words, he admonishes adolescents and young adults to balance their lives on the Four Pillars of Prosperity (i.e., Nurturing, Learning, Working and Leading). A graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School (Kingsport, Tennessee) and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, Tennessee), J. A. has been happily married to his wife for over 32 years and is the proud father to his 21-year-old son.
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