Janet Cheatham Bell is an author, an editor, a recovering academic, a mom (to comedian W. Kamau Bell), and a grateful grandmother to three of the smartest, cutest granddaughters ever... although she may be totally biased. She is also 80+ year-old still exploring new opportunities and taking risks.

She has returned to self-publishing after ten (10) books and twelve (12) years of being published by major publishers. In 1986 in Chicago, she published her first collection of quotations, Famous Black Quotations and some not so famous, followed by her second collection, Famous Black Quotations on women, love and other topics. These two popular titles were eventually licensed to Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing) and published as Famous Black Quotations. Nine other quotation collections from different publishers followed. While publishing, marketing and selling her quotation collections, she was also a consultant to Baker & Taylor’s midwest division.

In 2013, she was cited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. on national television as “a pioneer in doing books of black quotations.” Earlier in 1995 and 1996, New City, Chicago’s newspaper of literature and the arts, named her to “The Lit 50: Chicago’s Book World, Who Really Counts.”