June is a busy month for Hill Harper. This past Tuesday, June 3rd, saw the release of his second book, Letters to a Young Sister, which follows up his 2006 bestseller, Letters to a Young Brother. Harper is about to kick off a book tour that will take him across the country, but first he's finishing filming the first four episodes of CSI: New York's fifth season. Harper took time out of his busy schedule to discuss the release of his book and what's in store for his character, Dr. Sheldon Hawkes with CSI Files' Kristine Huntley.
CSI Files: Your second book, Letters to a Young Sister: DeFINE Your Destiny is out this week! Congratulations!
Hill Harper: It's a huge [week] for me. I couldn't be more excited. I couldn't be more proud of the book itself. I'm really happy and excited about it. There are two pictures of me on the set of CSI: New York, so that's kind of cool. This time there's a picture of myself, Gary [Sinise, Mac Taylor], Carmine [Giovinazzo, Danny Messer] and [Executive Producer] Pam Veasey and then there's just a picture of me.
CSI Files: How was the experience of writing this book different from writing your first book, Letters to a Young Brother?
Harper: Since it's for young women, I spent more time doing research and interviewing young women as well as [going] out to a lot of surrogate sisters. I have a lot more contributors [in this book]. Women I respect are contributing like Alfre Woodard, Angela Bassett, Michelle Obama, Ruby Dee, Gabrielle Union wrote the forward, Sanaa Lathan, Nikki Giovanni--just an amazing group of women contributed to the book. It's why I love the book so much, because of the diversity and the intelligence of the women that contributed. It's not just me and what I say, it's what they say as well.
CSI Files: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing young women today?
Harper: The biggest challenge that came up [when writing the book] that I noticed when dealing with young women was self-esteem and self-worth, a lot of issues surrounding body image and their view of themselves. The reason why the subtitle of the book is "DeFINE Your Destiny" is you want to recapture that self-esteem. I capitalized the FINE of "Define" [because] I want young women to look in the mirror and say that they're fine. I want them to define fine by saying, "I'm fantastic, I'm interesting, I'm necessary and I'm exceptional." That's what the "fine" of "define" is. It's really helping restore their own self-esteem and self-worth because once you do that, you can talk about future-based things like financial literacy, HIV/AIDS protection, pregnancy protection--all these things that involve thinking about you as a future being. So you really have to talk about self-esteem and self-worth [first].
CSI Files: I know with the first book you faced the--as it turns out, erroneous--preconception that young men don't read. Were there any similar challenges with this book?
Harper: No, not with getting it published because the success of the first book was so great that that was not an issue. But the issue for me is that I want this book to make The New York Times bestseller list like the last one because it's so important to send the message again to the publishers that books like this--motivational books, where the heart of the book is in the right place--to show them that there's a real market for it, books for young women. That's what I want, go to Amazon.com, go to my website for my charity, my foundation, which is Manifest Your Destiny and click through it. I still want to see this book to do really well, to reaffirm there's a market. I know of three more books in pipelines, motivational books, that were done because of the success of Letters to a Young Brother. I'm very proud of that.
CSI Files: What are some of the valuable lessons in the book for young women?
To read the full interviews, please click here.
He's so cute.
). I mean, I want more Hawkes, but not just any old way. 
