Charmaine Wilkerson is a Caribbean-American writer who has lived in Jamaica and Italy. Her debut novel Black Cake is a New York Times bestseller, a #ReadWithJenna book club pick, and the basis for the Hulu/Disney+ screen series of the same name. Her latest novel Good Dirt is releasing January 2025. Charmaine is a former news and communication professional whose award-winning short fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines.

Talk to us a little bit about how the adaptation of Black Cake came to be.

I was surprised because I was approached about potential adaptation of the novel very early in the process. The story was optioned and commissioned by Hulu before the book was even published. To this day, I am convinced that the announcement of a screen adaptation involving Oprah Winfrey’s production group and Hollywood veterans like showrunner Marissa Jo Cerar and Kapital Entertainment helped many readers who knew nothing about my writing to take notice of the book!

What was your involvement in the adaptation process? Were there any key moments in the book that you were particularly eager to see translated onto screen?

In the early stages, the writers and production team had questions about the inspiration for the novel, my research, and the various locations. In the later stages, I saw scripts, witnessed a bit of the filming and saw rough cuts of the episodes. Seeing the multicolored universe of the novel brought to the screen was important to me. I was eager to see a series that reflected the variety of faces and cultural combinations that you find on the page.

Now that you’ve been through the adaptation process from start to finish, is there anything you would do differently next time or any successes you’d like to see repeated?

Human connection among artists is so important. Seeing people who appreciated working together focus their talents and produce a film in four countries, during a pandemic, was pretty impressive. I’d love to see that energy and level of commitment every time!

As someone who created the world of Black Cake, how do you feel about the role of an author in the adaptation process? What are your thoughts on the balance between staying true to the book and allowing room for creative interpretation?

Each project is different but as the author of Black Cake, I never expected to see an exact replica of my book on the screen. This is an important issue, however, and it was essential to clarify up front everyone’s expectations of the relationship between the words on the page and the work on screen.

A lot of novels are optioned for film, but don’t necessarily ever make it to the screen. Do you have any insight into what sets your novel apart?

The world of Black Cake is a multicolored, multicultural world with interesting women and uncommon, though true-to-life, representations of people of color. While I thought this made it a wonderful candidate for an appealing film or series, this could have stood in the way of a screen adaptation. There’s still a significant difference between the world in which many of us live and what we see on the big or small screen.

When writing Black Cake, did you take into consideration how the story could work on screen as you were drafting?

Not at all. I was writing a novel that I wanted to see printed in a book. There are aspects of the novel which are crafted specifically for the written page. Chapters that are only one or two paragraphs long, resting on a mostly white page. An entire chapter written as a list. At the same time, it is true that as I was writing, I would see and hear characters. Ideally, a writer is evoking an environment that may play out in the reader’s head like a film. The opening scene of the series, for example, is so close to what I saw in my own mind as I was writing that it made me smile when I first saw it!

Be sure to check out Charmaine’s latest novel, Good Dirt, on shelves January 2025!

Good Dirt

Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson

This sweeping family epic follows Ebby Freeman whose childhood is shattered with he sound of a gunshot and the discovery of her brother on the floor, surrounded by the shards of a broken family heirloom that had been in their family for generations. The unsolved crime drew the attention of the media, and now, as her high profile relationship falls apart in the public eye, Ebby chooses to flee to France. But the past is hard to run from and now she must dig into her family’s history in order to carve a path for her future.

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