Her latest book is The Time and Place That Gave Me Life
published by Indiana University Press in June 2007. It has been called “the best form of social history.”
Janet Cheatham Bell's career as an author began when she created Sabayt Publications in 1985 to publish Famous Black Quotations and Some Not So Famous and Famous Black Quotations on Women, Love and other topics, in 1986 and 1992 respectively. Operating alone out of a spare bedroom, Bell sold over 90,000 copies of the two titles before licensing them to Warner Books in 1994.
Warner combined the two books into one volume which they published in 1995 under the title Famous Black Quotations
. Warner also published Bell’s Victory of the Spirit: Meditations on Black Quotations
in 1996. John Wiley & Sons commissioned Bell to develop a book of business quotations that they published as The Soul of Success: Inspiring Quotations for Entrepreneurs
in 1997. In 1999 with Lucille Freeman she compiled Stretch Your Wings: Famous Black Quotations for Teens
, published by Little, Brown and Company.
The following year Bell received a commission from Andrews Mc Meel to develop four gift books: Famous Black Quotations on Mothers, …on Sisters, …on Love, and … on Birthdays. And in 2002 Simon & Schuster’s Washington Square Press published her brief history, Till Victory Is Won: Famous Black Quotations From the NAACP
.
While she worked on these titles, Bell was also serving a number of consulting clients on a variety of projects including the book, Start Where You Find Yourself by Charlie Nelms, , and Prather Enterprises, owner of Bid Whist Online. She also developed four annotated bibliographies of African American and Hispanic American titles for Baker & Taylor book wholesalers, and was a consultant on the history textbook, America: The People and the Dream for Scott, Foresman and Company.
Bell also wrote the food memories for the best selling National Council of Negro Women's Black Family Reunion Cookbook, and the instructional materials for The Souls of Black Folk for McDougal Littell, textbook publishers.
She began her professional career in 1962 as a librarian at the Indiana State Library, Indianapolis. After earning her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1964, she became the assistant librarian at MacArthur High School in Saginaw, Michigan. In 1967 she accepted a position at the Ohio University Library in Athens. The following year, in the wake of student responses to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the university recruited her to teach freshman composition and African American literature.
She left Ohio University in 1970 to work as associate editor of The Black Scholar in Sausalito, California. Several months later she was hired as research associate for the Multi Ethnic Education Resource Center, a project of the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford University. The project published Teaching Black: an Evaluation of Methods and Resources in 1972. Then St. Clair Drake, the program's chairman, asked her to develop a basic collection of books by and about African Americans for Stanford's undergraduate library. She also enrolled in Stanford's English doctoral program on a Ford Foundation Fellowship.
In 1974 Bell accepted a position as Ethnic Studies Consultant at the Indiana Department of Education in Indianapolis. From there she was recruited in 1978 to help develop a literature series for grades seven through twelve at Ginn & Company, textbook publishers in Lexington, Massachusetts. When she resigned that position in 1984, Bell moved to Chicago where she established Sabayt Publications to publish her own books, and worked as an independent editor and publishing consultant.
In 1995 the Chicago Tribune wrote about Bell’s quotation collections in their Arts and Entertainment feature, “Faces in the Crowd.” Chicago's Black Book Fair selected The Soul of Success as Best Nonfiction Book in 1999, and New City, Chicago’s news and arts weekly twice named Bell to “The Lit 50: Chicago’s Book World, Who Really Counts.”
