March 15, 2003 For more information: Frank R. Scatoni 619-807-1887 frank@ventureliterary.com "No Kill Date" Venture Literary Sells Philanthropist Oral Lee Brown’s Memoir to Doubleday On March 15, 2003, Greg Dinkin of Venture Literary, representing Oral Lee Brown and Caille Millner, sold the North American rights to The Promise: The Story of a Woman with a Big Heart and Even Bigger Dreams to Janet Hill at Doubleday. In 1987, as a forty-eight-year-old Realtor making $45,000 a year, Brown went to buy groceries at the Hub on 94th Street in East Oakland. While she stood in line, a young girl walked up to her and said, "Lady, can you please give me a quarter?" When this little girl proceeded to buy a loaf of bread and a package of bologna, something hit Brown hard. It dawned on her that that one quarter might mean the difference between whether this girl—and her family—ate dinner that night. The troubled feeling didn’t go away, and in December 1987, Brown went to find the girl at Brookfield Elementary, a school in the toughest section of East Oakland. She didn’t find her, but Brown did find twenty-three first-graders just like her. Acting on impulse—and some would say on fate—Brown made a promise to all twenty-three students that if they stayed in school and graduated from high school, she would pay to send them to college. In 1999, twelve years after Brown pledged her support, nineteen of the twenty-three students realized their dream, and Brown made good on her promise, paying each student’s tuition from the money she saved through her eponymous foundation. Then in 2001, showing that there are no limits to her intense spirit of will, Brown adopted another group of students—this time, twenty ninth-graders, twenty fifth-graders, and twenty first-graders—and made the same promise to sixty more students. In The Promise, Oral Lee Brown, one of Glamour magazine’s 2002 Women of the Year, tells the remarkable story of one woman’s unending desire to make a difference. Her difficult childhood in Batesville, Mississippi—where she endured years of mental and physical abuse, not to mention acts of racism beyond comprehension—coupled with the fact that she was sent a thousand miles from home when she was just twelve, provides the perfect backdrop for Brown’s success as an adult. Katie Couric, greeting Oral Lee Brown on the Today show, said, "You are my hero." In addition to her appearance on Today, Brown has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, CNN’s Extra, Later Today, and Courage, an inspirational show hosted by Danny Glover. Brown will be doing a national publicity campaign to coincide with the book’s publication in September 2004. The book will be written with Caille Millner, whose work has appeared in Children of the Dream: Growing Up Black in America, Essence magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Art & Understanding, and The Fader. Millner has received awards from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Press Club, and the New York Black Journalists’ Association, as well as a Berta Ledecky Fellowship from Harvard Magazine. In addition, she was recently voted one of Columbia Journalism Review’s "Ten Young Writers to Watch." To learn more about Venture Literary, visit: www.ventureliterary.com. To learn more about the Oral Lee Brown Foundation, visit: http://www.localcommunities.org To see a video clip on Ms. Brown’s appearance on the Today show, click here: http://www.realtor.org/ To learn more about Doubleday, visit, http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/