Hidden Figures author sets 2 new books about “extraordinary ordinary African-Americans”

By Sam Barsanti | April 11, 2017 | 6:51pm

Aux Features Film

Nothing boosts your career as an author quite like having your work get adapted into a successful, award-winning film, and now Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly is enjoying some of the perks of being the woman behind last year’s blockbuster film of the same name. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Shetterly has just signed a two-book deal with publisher Viking, and she says both of them will follow Hidden Figures’ lead by telling stories about “extraordinary ordinary African-Americans” whose contributions to history to have been unfairly “untold, unseen, or overlooked.”

The first book doesn’t seem to have a title yet, but Viking says it will be about two families in midcentury Baltimore that are “alike in power and vision.” One, the Murphy family, runs a newspaper and is “the epitome of respectability” among Baltimore’s black community. The other, the Adams family, got its money “from the numbers racket” and uses it to become “philanthropists, investors,” and a major supporting of “entrepreneurship and economic development in the city’s African-American community.”