Bill Clinton calls her a racist. Jada Pinkett Smith calls her “honest, direct…clear and profound.” Bill Clinton believes she advocates violence against whites. Jada Pinkett Smith finds “her work spiritually rewarding and powerful."

Lisa Williamson was born in the Bronx projects in 1964. During her youth she was a perpetual welfare recipient; a fact she found "fraught with indignity." Driven to escape her environment she studied hard, earning scholarships to Cornell and Rutgers where she studied history. During college she became a Civil Rights activist. To that end she has worked with United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, and founded the African Youth Survival Camp for homeless kids in North Carolina.

In 1991 her lectures attracted the attention of Chuck D. of rap group Public Enemy. He invited her to perform on a Public Enemy album, at which time she adopted her stage name Sister Souljah. Sister Souljah is a combination of "soul" and the word for God in both Hebrew and the Rastafari movement. In 1992 she released her solo album "360 Degrees of Power." She says the album allowed her to distribute a message she felt was important for African Americans. Her uncompromising lyrics drew the attention of then President George Bush and presidential hopeful Bill Clinton, but the album quickly dropped off the charts and is generally considered unsuccessful. Despite her album's 15 minutes of fame, Sister Souljah is credited with bringing race issues back to the attention of mainstream America.

In 1994, Sister Souljah published her autobiography, No Disrespect in which she shares an oftentimes harsh, but common African-American experience hoping to increase understanding of relationships and she aspires to helping African-Americans avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Published in 1999, The Coldest Winter Ever is Sister Souljah’s first novel. It tells the story of Winter Santiaga, the pampered and spoiled daughter of a wealthy drug dealer. When her father is arrested and all the family’s assets are frozen, Winter is ill prepared to deal with her new-found circumstances. For the average middle class citizen, this book provides a glimpse of a very different life, where the rules don’t make sense and the people behave in incomprehensible ways. The end of the book finds Winter in a hopeless situation, but leaves room for other characters in the story to break the cycle that Winter was caught up in.

Midnight: A Gangster Love Story is scheduled for publication in October 2008 and is a sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever. In The Coldest Winter Ever, Winter takes a romantic interest in Midnight, her father’s loyal and dependable employee. His values, however, are very different from hers, and thus their paths diverge in ways simultaneously hopeless and hopeful. This middle class, white reader, hopes to see Midnight break out of the environment he knows and engage in meaningful work and loving relationships. I believe this is what Sister Souljah would like for him as well, but I’ll have to wait until October to see where Souljah takes him in the foreign terrain of the inner city.

Sister Souljah continues to lecture on issues of race, culture, sexism, and politics as well as continuing to serve charitable organizations. She has been happily married for over 15 years and has one child. For more information visit www.sistersouljah.com.