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

Sunny Hostin has some exciting writing plans for the new year.

In a Jan. 7 episode of The View’s Behind the Table podcast, the View cohost, 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 husband Emmanuel.

Hostin is the author of three novels, centered around a family living in a prestigious Black beach community on Martha’s Vineyard. The series includes Summer on the Bluffs (2021), Summer on Sag Harbor (2023) and Summer on Highland Beach (2024). The writer said that one of her goals for 2025 is to write more.

“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 says, but includes “different characters [and] different places.”

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“I'm really excited about it,” Hostin said. “So I'm gonna do a lot more of that.”

Hostin is currently adapting her trilogy into a TV series with Amazon MGM Studios, and said that she’s been helping with script development.

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“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.”

Hostin spoke with PEOPLE in 2021 for the publication of Summer on the Bluffs, and explained that she wrote the novel as a way to see representation of Black and Latino characters on the page.

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"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.'”

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Hostin, who is also the author of the 2020 memoir I 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.'"

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