Janet Cheatham Bell

author and publishing consultant

Janet Cheatham Bell, a writer, speaker, and publishing consultant, was born and reared in Indianapolis. She has also lived in Athens, Ohio; Saginaw, Michigan; in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. She currently resides in Bloomington, Indiana.

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.”

Bell's publishing career 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. (These gift books are only available from the author.) And in 2002 Simon & Schuster’s Washington Square Press published her brief history, Till Victory Is Won: Famous Black Quotations From the NAACP.

While publishing these titles, Bell was also serving a number of consulting clients on a variety of projects that included: Charlie Nelms, vice president, Indiana University and author of Start Where You Find Yourself, and Prather Enterprises' What2Read. 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. She wrote copy for the National Council of Negro Women's Black Family Reunion Cookbook, and wrote instructional materials for The Souls of Black Folk for McDougal Littell, textbook publishers.

Bell earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1964, and began her professional career as a high school librarian 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.

Bell left Ohio University in 1970 to work as associate editor of The Black Scholar in Sausalito, California. Several months later she was hired as a research associate for the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Stanford University and published Teaching Black: an Evaluation of Methods and Resources. Following completion of that project Stanford asked her to develop a basic collection of books by and about African Americans for their undergraduate library. She also enrolled in the English doctoral program at Stanford.

In 1974 Bell accepted a position as Ethnic Studies Consultant at the Indiana Department of Public Instruction (now 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 to work as an independent editor and publishing consultant. She resided in Chicago for sixteen years and still considers it her favorite city.

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.”