Touré

Touré has written three books: The Portable Promised Land (2003), a collection of short stories, Soul City (2004), a magical realist novel about life in an African-American Utopia, and Never Drank the Kool-Aid (2006), a collection of his writing from Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Village Voice, The Believer, Playboy, TENNIS Magazine, and others, written between 1994 and 2005.In 1992, his junior year at Emory University, Touré dropped out of college and became an intern at Rolling Stone. He was fired after a few months but weeks later was asked to write record reviews and then feature stories. His first feature was about Run-DMC. Since 1997, he has been a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone, writing primarily about hip hop. He has written cover stories about Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, Eminem, Beyoncé, DMX, Lauryn Hill, and, in December 2005, Jay-Z, a story called "The Book of Jay". He has also written about Dale Earnhardt Jr., a story that ended up in the Best American Sportswriting of 2001. He has often evoked the participatory journalism of George Plimpton or Tom Wolfe, while, for example, playing high-stakes poker with Jay-Z, two-on-two basketball with Prince, one-on-one basketball with Wynton Marsalis, tennis with Jennifer Capriati, or writing illegal graffiti with known graffiti artists.In 1996, upset that a feature story he'd written for The New Yorker was rejected, he enrolled in the graduate school for creative writing at Columbia University to learn more about non-fiction. He took a fiction writing class and wrote a story about a black saxophonist in Harlem named Sugar Lips Shinehot who loses the ability to see white people called "The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land". The second story he wrote, about a dangerously sexual preacher, was called "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love." After it won an award from the magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, he embarked on a fiction writing career.After a year at Columbia, Touré left to write a biography of rapper KRS-One. He traveled with KRS to London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and New Jersey, interviewing him for over a year until KRS abruptly shelved the project.