Years ago as a young, motherless child growing up in Pittsburgh, Jewell Parker Rhodes sat on her grandmother's porch and listened to her stories.

Inside the house, she read, her imagination unleashed by literature.

Both actions, she says, soothed her soul and gave her strength.

Now, the 54-year-old Ms. Rhodes has become an accomplished writer. Some of her pages are filled with her grandmother's wisdom, others show her imagination and fascination with African folklore and its intersection with American culture.

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Author Jewell Parker Rhodes ventures into children's literature.

Ms. Rhodes will read excerpts from her Porch Stories: A Grandmother's Guide to Happiness on Saturday as part of "Tulisoma 2008," the South Dallas book fair and arts festival.

She's also the author of the acclaimed novels Magic City and Douglass' Women and the newly released Yellow Moon. Her latest work is part of a New Orleans trilogy that takes readers into the mystical world of 19th-century voodoo priestess Marie Laveau and her descendants.

"When I wrote Voodoo Dreams ages ago," Ms. Rhodes says about the first book in the trilogy, "I thought I would like to write a book that is a cross between Anne Rice, Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison."

The novel is a steamy, haunting murder mystery that includes a black vampire whose misguided efforts are fed by a cultural identity warped by colonialism and racism. The latest descendant of Marie Laveau, Dr. Marie Levant, is a doctor at Charity Hospital as well as a priestess, making her capable of healing in both the physical and metaphysical worlds.

Marie Laveau, Ms. Rhodes says in a phone interview, became a role model for her when she discovered Laveau's legend while researching in college.

"I was trying to write my first short story, and it came to me that I was haunted by her," she says.

"Mother abandoned me as a child, and I was raised by my grandmother. I was always thinking there was something amiss about me. I was searching for how to be a woman of color in the world."

Laveau's success despite adversity helped teach Ms. Rhodes, she says, that "being a woman is just fine. Life is a celebration. I felt it in my soul and bones that I had become transformed, and that has carried me through these last decades."

Ms. Rhodes, a professor at Arizona State University, says her next installment in the trilogy will place Dr. Levant at Charity Hospital as the levees break during Hurricane Katrina. But before Ms. Rhodes finishes writing that book, she has another milestone she wants to share.

She recently completed a children's novel with themes familiar to her: A preteen girl, who loves science and is being raised by her grandmother, tries to survive Hurricane Katrina's aftermath with a friend.

She hopes the book will do for others what literature has done for her. She wants young people to recognize their own heroism and see their own strength.

"In a strange sort of way, I've been waiting all my life to grow up enough to write children's novels," Ms. Rhodes says. "Children's literature saved my life, and my grandmother's story saved my life. If you have a book and your imagination, you are never alone."

Karen Thomas is a freelance writer in Arlington.