Sunny Hostin Teases New Beach Reads and Shares Her 2025 Writing Goals: ‘I’m So Excited’

Mar. 15, 2025

Sunny Hostin in Sept. 2024.Photo:John Nacion/Variety via Getty

John Nacion/Variety via Getty

Sunny Hostinhas some exciting writing plans for the new year.In a Jan. 7 episode ofThe View’sBehind the Tablepodcast, theViewcohost, 56, told executive producer Brian Teta that she’s had more time to write since her children Gabriel, 22, and Paloma, 18, left home.“I was struggling, and I’m much better now,” Hostin said of being an empty-nester, following her daughter’s departure for college. “I have more time to write. So I’m writing two new books.” Hostin shares her children with husbandEmmanuel.Hostin is the author of three novels, centered around a family living in a prestigious Black beach community on Martha’s Vineyard. The series includesSummer on the Bluffs(2021),Summer on Sag Harbor(2023) andSummer on Highland Beach(2024). The writer said that one of her goals for 2025 is to write more.

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“I’m writing a book about witches, and I’m writing another beach series,” Hostin said. “It’s something that the publisher wanted.” The forthcoming series is potentially set in the same world as her previous books, Hostin said, but includes “different characters [and] different places.”

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.“It is a lot of work, Brian,” Hostin admitted. “I’m, like, reviewing scripts and editing scripts and stuff like that and looking at casting. And so that’s been a longer process than I thought it was gonna be, but we’ll get it right, and I think it’s gonna be fantastic.”“I really like being an author,” Hostin added. “It’s really a great thing for me.”

Sunny Hostin in Aug. 2024.Roy Rochlin/2024 Getty

Roy Rochlin/2024 Getty

Hostinspoke with PEOPLEin 2021 for the publication ofSummer on the Bluffs, and explained that she wrote the novel as a way to see representation of Black and Latino characters on the page.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!“I love beach reads, but I never see beach reads with people of color. I really wanted to write about characters that have similar lived experiences to my own,” she said.

“When I would travel, I would run into the little airport bookstores, and I would look for characters of color on the cover — they just didn’t exist. I thought that if I was looking that maybe other people were looking as well, and Toni Morrison often said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.'”

Hostin, who is also the author of the 2020 memoirI Am These Truths, noted the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, explaining that she had to be “really raw and honest” when delving into her personal life.“When you have a story where you grow up in the projects, and you’ve seen addiction and violence and failure, that’s a heavy, heavy thing to actually put on paper,” Hostin said.

“I wrote about having several miscarriages. I wrote about it all. I wanted it to be completely unvarnished because, in a way, I also wanted it to be aspirational,” she continued. “I wanted people to be able to read it and say, ‘She went through a lot and is okay on the other side of it. So if she could, I could do it.'”

source: people.com