Ellis's first novel, Platitudes, was published in 1988 and reissued by Northeastern University Press in 2003, along with his 1989 essay "The New Black Aesthetic".
Alongside this narrative is the story of Dorothy, a black student at a private high school who lives in Harlem, yet can navigate easily in her mostly white social circles.
Ellis' exaggerated representations of each style is humorous, essentially complicating the hegemonic artistic voice of the Black Arts Movement.
His latest book is Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood (2008), a memoir of his life as a single father of two.
He is a regular blogger on The Huffington Post and lives in Manhattan, where he is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Film.
His work for the theater includes the plays Fly, Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing and Holy Mackerel.
Now, for example, black students go to colleges to be art majors rather than always pursuing a law degree or going to medical school upon graduating because their parents have given them the means to do so.
Ellis' novel Platitudes takes advantage of the NBA in order to represent some of the new aesthetic possibilities available to blacks in America.
He refers to Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie as "neutered mutations" that chose to conform and commercialize their once soulful style just so they could maximize their profits by appealing to multiple cultures.
Ellis appropriates the somewhat offensive term mulatto in his creation of rhetoric to describe this contemporary black locus as a means to challenge prevalent notions of multiracial; or in this case, "culturally multiracial", black people falling subject to the fate of the tragic mulatto, or "neutered mutant".
"[3] While prevalent as a stereotypical figure in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, the tragic mulattoes need not exist in postmodern society.
The NBA, as characterized by Ellis, allows space for the cultural mulatto to perform a self-defined, authentic form of identity that does not rely on the self-deluding practice of negating his or her blackness.
[3] Cultural mulattoes exist in great numbers and, fueled by the ideology of the NBA, space for hybridity is opened and, subsequently, feelings of dislocation in a strictly dichotomous society are collectively obliterated.
Through their skills that allow successful navigation in both the white and black social spheres, the cultural mulattoes that typify the NBA are using their access to higher education and various breeds of dominant cultural capital to make "atypically black" art and earn respect devoid of essentialist racial categorizations.
Ashe writes, "There has been no fundamental, sociocultural paradigm shift akin to the civil rights movement to alter the post-soul aesthetic focus" or to thrust black Americans into a new way of being and existing.
As characters, Issa and "Earn" display an ability to navigate white spaces to varying degrees and embody the idea of the "cultural mulatto".
The metafictional component of Platitudes helps the reader explore the New Black Aesthetic by portraying one story in which the two fictional authors, Dewayne and Isshee, embody two different ideas and perspectives on how black should be expressed and another story of two characters’ struggle to fit into the white world as a “cultural mulatto”.
He scoffs at the mainstream image of "authentic blackness" by creating the character Earle, a chubby teenage New Yorker who only thinks about sex (that he is not having) and academics.
All in all, a majority of the events that happen in the story of Earle and Dorothy are an indirect reflection of the dynamics of Dewayne Wellington's relationship with Isshee Ayam.
In Platitudes, Ellis depicts the tension between two African-American authors, Isshee and Dewayne, as they debate on the proper portrayal of Black characters.
Isshee objects to Dewayne's portrayal of Black women, claiming he presented them in an “atavistic” sense, overtly sexualized by Earle, a protagonist in their stories (15).
Isshee recreates the narrative to an “Afro-American glory-stor[y]” while Dewayne gives a modern, sensual take on middle-class African-Americans (19).
His existence is the product of the civil rights movement which sanctioned the ability for him to live unpunished within the white world of Downtown Harlem.
[5] His counterpart, Dorothy is a thriving hybrid, another neologism by Ellis, she is capable of blending into the landscapes of both worlds, yet she is still self-conscious of her presence in both spaces.
This NBA tenet is repeatedly evident in the presentation of Earle's relationship to masculinity and the stereotype of black hypermasculinity throughout the novel.
For example, when Dorothy's boyfriend (hypermasculine LeVon) usurps him as her potential love interest, his response was not aggressive, or even particularly assertive: "I can't believe it.
Ellis maintains the aleatory disconnection by constantly changing the style of the novel; he shifts from dialogue to stream of consciousness to a third-person omniscient point of view.
Ellis breaks the normal flow of extended prose not by default of this being a metafiction but because he writes the novel in an epistolary format.
Far from the postmodern beating out the traditional, or the experimental taking a back seat to the realist, the honest black experience of the time can only be told through a combination of the two approaches.
He was also the subject of a half-hour documentary aired nationally on PBS, part of the series A Moveable Feast on South Carolina Educational Television/WETA-TV in 1991.