Omar Tyree a veteran in the Urban Fiction or in his case African-American adult fiction publishing game has decided to sat down and ummm RETIRE. I know I know this is not NBA basketball or NFL football but he is hell bent on retiring. Alrightee then-according to my fabulous and favorite Urban Fiction website, WWW.URBANBOOKSOURCE.COM the 16 book author that wrote Fly Girl is calling it quits because his pen has finally run out of ink. Tyree blames the hotness and demand of true Urban Fiction and Street Literature on his demise and fall from grace.

“Teri Woods, Vickie Stringer, Nikki Turner, Shannon Holmes, K’wan, and several others, related to my “urban classics” alone, and they began to match it, writing from their own sources of hardcore street knowledge. And I can’t knock them for writing their honest stories. I can’t knock them for wanting to be published. I can’t knock them for earning an honest living. But after awhile, as dozens of other new writers began to follow in their footsteps, creating more gold-digging, ghetto girl, gangster love, drug-dealer stories, I had to seriously ask myself, “Don’t we have some other things to write about it?”

Tyree’s foxy and unfly comments can be found all over the internet as he screams foul play from his soap box in reference to his novels falling off. It is primo funny how he effortlessly blames Urban Fiction. “For the record, I never called my work “street literature” and I never will. When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them “urban classics.” They were “urban” because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or “urban” population areas. They were “classics” because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era. But now, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, I feel like the man who created the monster Frankenstein. Things have gotten way out of hand. So it’s now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects.” Oh poor you!

The Urban Fiction community has mixed thoughts on Omar’s reckless words towards the industry and can be viewed on WWW.URBANBOOKSOURCE.COM where their message and comment boards are being flooded with thoughts on his retirement. Omar Tyree has a new book called the Pecking Order so it will be interesting to see if this was simply a publicity stunt or not.

In closing Tyree rants and raves, “If the only way I can earn a living now in African-American adult fiction is to sell my people the same poison that they’ve become addicted to, then I quit with my artistic integrity still in tact, while moving on to a more progressive mission.”

~Story still developing for now…