Alicia Keys Writing “Diary”
Just twenty-three years old, Alicia Keys doesn’t have a particularly long life to reflect back upon, but the R&B star nevertheless has landed a book deal for her memoir to be published later this year.
Like her chart-topping second album, the book will be titled The Diary of Alicia Keys and will be published as a hardcover by Putnam in the fall of 2005, with a paperback edition to follow the next year. Diary is part of a two-book deal for the singer; Songbook, a collection of her poems and lyrics, will be published this November.
Diary will offer Keys’ reflections growing up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in the Eighties and Nineties, covering her musical education and rise to stardom barely out of her teens. “I’m a huge fan of Keys, especially her genius for mixing styles from jazz to hip-hop to classic Seventies soul to great a sound and mood that’s contemporary and her own,” acquiring editor David Highfill said. “I believe we will be reveling in her art and listening to what she has to say for years to come.”
Keys was only twenty when she released her Grammy-winning, multi-platinum debut album, Songs in A Minor, in 2001. After more than six months of release, the follow-up The Diary of Alicia Keys remains in the Top Twenty on the pop charts and has sold more than 2 million copies.