Even though there's no denying the popularity of urban fiction (or street lit, or whatever you want to call the genre) the question of whether this is good or bad for African-Americans is still a long way from being answered. That's what the Washington Post's Marcela Valdes reports after attending the African American Book Industry Professionals Conference and sitting in the audience for "Too Hood or All Good?: The Impact of Urban Fiction on African American Literature," moderated by Nick Chiles.

What was once a romance-heavy niche (think Terry McMillan and Eric Jerome Dickey) has taken a much more brutal direction - one that Chiles isn't too happy with. In January, Valdes said, the author threw down his glove, declaring in a New York Times op-ed piece that urban fiction's "lurid book jackets" turn African American literature sections into "a pornography shop," and that "the sexualization and degradation of black fiction" left him "thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted."

Not surprisingly, there were plenty of counter-arguments in store. I'm an abandoned child," bestselling author Treasure E. Blue proclaimed during the Q&A portion. "I've seen horrors through these eyes that I still can't get out of my head. Things that happened to me as well as my sister. Things they done to me as well as I done to them. But this is my story. You cannot fault a person for telling these stories."

And as long as they still sell in droves, such stories will be told. But it does speak to a larger issue of whether it serves any ethnic minority - African-American, Jewish, Indian, Hispanic, whatever - to be set apart from the rest of the literary world.