Best seller BeBe Moore Campbell dies at 56

Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, (she is also the mother of In the House star Maia Campbell) whose best-selling books included Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir and Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, died Monday in Los Angeles from complications related to brain cancer. She was 56.
"My wife was a phenomenal woman who did it her way," her husband, Ellis Gordon Jr., said in a statement released to the media. "She loved her family and her career as a writer. We enjoyed life together as a team and we will miss her immensely and will love her forever." Nicholas Latimer, spokesman for her publisher, Knopf, said, "She will be remembered fondly."
Campbell, whose books were lauded for their realistic depictions of social issues, race relations and family dynamics, also wrote about mental illness in her fiction and was a well-known advocate for the mentally ill.
The author, an only child who was born and raised in Philadelphia, was motivated by a family member's struggles with mental health.
72 Hour Hold, her most recent adult novel, published last year, is about a woman struggling to find a treatment for her daughter's bipolar disorder.
She also dealt with mental health in her award-winning 2005 children's book Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry, about a young girl trying to understand and deal with her mother's illness.
Campbell's last book, Stompin' at the Savoy, was published in September. It's a children's book about a young girl who is magically transported to the famous ballroom where the jazz greats performe