Novels she wrote, in Philadelphia

Brooklyn may be the presumed center of the universe for emerging writers. But Philadelphia is asserting itself as a city of novelists.

And why not? We're already home to a slew of established fiction writers (Ken Kalfus, whose work is literary fiction, and L.A. Banks, who writes about vampires, to name two ends of the subject spectrum.) We have a core of creative types, plenty of coffee, and a touch of cool.

The difference between Philly and Flatbush is that our region's emerging novelists did not move here in search of a scene. They were already here - raising children or working in unrelated careers.

There are men in that mix: Mystery writer Dennis Tafoya worked in industrial sales before Dope Thief (Minotaur Books, May 2009). The Wolves of Fairmount Park, also from Minotaur, will be out in June.

But women predominate, and here are a few to keep an eye on:

Susan Abulhawa, a former neuroscientist, wrote Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury Press, 2010) after five years at Wyeth.

"The day I got laid off from that job is the day I started writing the book," she says. "I was scared to death."

She went on welfare and into debt, but in Mornings, Abulhawa has created a compassionate, ground-level view of a Palestinian family caught in the heart-wrenching realities of life in the Middle East.

The subject matter was a hard sell here in the United States, but publishers in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom were all more open to it and picked it up first.

Abulhawa's parents were refugees from the 1967 Six-Day War; she came to the United States alone and lived in a succession of foster homes. She is a full-time medical writer and a single mother, raising a teenage daughter in Bucks County.

In 2001, she founded a charity, Playgrounds for Palestine.

Susan Barr-Toman's book When Love Was Clean Underwear (New Rivers Press, 2009) is set in the South Philadelphia of demanding mothers, dutiful daughters, and prying neighbors.

Barr-Toman managed a computer-support team for a time, but when she and her husband were about to start a family, she also got serious about writing fiction.

Barr-Toman earned an M.F.A. at Bennington College in Vermont through a "low residency" program that requires students to spend a minimum amount of time on campus. And, through a Bennington connection, she found a writers group that meets monthly in Conshohocken.

Her finished manuscript won the Many Voices Project Fiction award, sponsored by Minnesota State University, for which the prize was getting published by New Rivers Press.

"Do you need an M.F.A.? Do you need a writers group? I get these questions all the time," Barr-Toman says. "And the answer is no, not necessarily."

"But if you can find a group that suits you, it enriches your life and improves your writing."

Like Abulhawa, Robin Black, of Merion, whose debut short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, was published this month by Random House, received a grant in 2002 from the Leeway Foundation, which supports women artists creating social change.

"I'm the classic late bloomer," says Black, a stay-at-home mother for 22 years. "My oldest child is graduating from college and this is the first professional achievement of my life."

She, too, went the low-residency route, earning an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C., and found focus and discipline closer to home at the Rittenhouse Writers Group, founded by James Rahn.

"I only wish that every anxious hopeful writer who expects at any minute to be declared a fraud had such a place to be," she says of Rahn's group.

Still, short-story collections are notoriously ignored by publishers and misunderstood by readers, who think a short story is the author's trial balloon.

"The irony is that the people who give short shrift to short stories, in the same breath will tell you they love Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro."

Black has an enviable ability to create wholly believable characters, people you'd swear you know, and by showing them in passage through life's transitions, she reveals the source of their longings.

Her collection of 10 stories took eight years to complete, and prepublication trade reviews compare her to Margaret Atwood and Grace Paley.

Black will read at noon Saturday at the Free Library of Philadelphia Book Festival.

Joanne Dahme, who lives in Roxborough with her husband and college-age son, was in high school when Earth Day brought environmental awareness into the mainstream.

Inspired by that experience, she studied civil engineering at Villanova University and in 1980 began work at the Philadelphia Water Department. She is now watersheds program manager there.

Dahme had wanted to write ever since reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. She tried journalism as a gateway, earning a graduate degree from Temple University in 1984. That approach didn't really work, but it introduced her to creative writing instructor Victoria Brownworth, who helped Dahme find her voice writing young-adult fiction.

Dahme has continued to work with Brownworth in a small-group setting for 22 years, even as she returned to Temple for another graduate degree, in creative writing.

Dahme's first three novels, Creepers, The Plague, and Tombstone Tea, were published in quick succession by Perseus Books. Meanwhile, the first novel she ever wrote, Contagion, is due in the fall.

Ru Freeman left her native Sri Lanka to attend Bates College, met her husband ("a real Connecticut Yankee") there, and the two returned to her homeland for grad school.

He's now an administrator at Bryn Mawr College and their three daughters are in Lower Merion schools. Freeman worked for the federal Job Corps program in Philadelphia and New York, and the AFL-CIO's international branch in Sri Lanka before turning her attention to fiction.

She started work on A Disobedient Girl (Atria Books, 2009) at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2005 and in four successive summers.

Admirers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai will savor Freeman's novel, which juxtaposes events in the lives of several Sri Lankan women, some who are taken in childhood as future housemaids, and others who are their wealthy owner/employers.

"I grew up in a family of people who read and wrote . . . so I never thought writing was something I had to go out and learn how to do."

Pam Jenoff, who lives in Haddonfield, practiced law and worked with the State Department in Poland before becoming a writer.

Equipped with an idea drawn from her time in Europe, Jenoff took Janet Benton's course at Temple, then called "Write Your Novel This Year" (later it was "Write . . . This Month" and, finally, "Write . . . Now!")

Jenoff wrote every day from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and did, indeed, finish the year with a completed manuscript.

Thirty-nine rejection letters later, she found a taker in 2007. Mira Books published Jenoff's historical fiction, The Kommandant's Girl, and its sequel, The Kommandant's Wife, best sellers in the United Kingdom.

Now married with one child and another on the way, Jenoff teaches legal writing at Rutgers-Camden. Her novel A Hidden Affair (Atria Books) comes out in July.

Ligia Ravé was born in Romania, grew up in Tel Aviv, went to school in Paris, and lives in Center City.

After a career teaching architecture, Ravé wrote Hanah's Paradise (New Door Books, 2009) in just three weeks - and then spent four years polishing the novel, which is the tale of an extended family bound by their traditions to a mystical homestead.

Ravé did not take writing classes. "I just had a terrific husband [architect David Slovic] who gave me the time, corrected my spelling, and encouraged me to develop my ideas."

"The writing became addictive," Ravé says. "The characters went to emotional places that I never knew existed."

The book, written in English, was first picked up by a publisher in Barcelona and translated into Spanish. The English version was published later in the United States.

"All that I experienced in all the countries where I had lived, and all that I learned from all the languages that I speak, became a reality that found its place in Hanah's Paradise."