Black Women Writers Archive Finder
The Black Women Writers Project aims to make primary sources on Black women and gender expansive writers more easily discoverable by compiling information from global repositories. Pages are updated annually and new pages are added monthly. We strive to ensure the information in the Archive Finder is accurate, but please reach out if you find dead links or factual discrepancies. Have an idea for a profile? Get in touch. The Black Women Writers Project Archive Finder is an educational resource and reproduces excerpts from finding aids, open source documents, publications, and internet sources. Interested in citing something? Read our copyright and reuse policy. BWWP is committed to making information available to all. Find out more about our efforts on our accessibility page.
A.
Donna Allegra
Donna Allegra (c.1953–January 13, 2020) was an African-American lesbian writer, poet, essayist and dancer. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Allegra studied theater at Bennington College and Hunter College, graduating from New York University in 1977 with a Bachelor's degree in dramatic literature, theater history, and cinema. She worked as a construction electrician to support her writing and dancing; reviewed dance, theatre and film productions as a freelance cultural journalist; and produced lesbian and feminist-oriented radio programming for WBAI from 1975-1981.
Allegra was an early member of the Jemima Writers Collective, the first Black lesbian writing group in New York City. The collective grew out of the Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest Black lesbian organization in the United States, and was founded to encourage Black women writers to share their creative work with each other in a supportive environment. Fellow members of Jemima included Candace Boyce, Georgia Brooks, Linda Brown, Robin Christian, Yvonne Flowers (Maua), Chirlane McCray, Irare Sabasu, and Sapphire. Allegra later joined the Gap-Toothed Girlfriends Writers Workshop.
A prolific writer of poetry, short stories, and biographical essays, Allegra has been published in over thirty lesbian and feminist anthologies and numerous Black and lesbian journals and magazines. Her work has been printed in Home Girls: Black Feminist Anthology (1983), Sinister Wisdom, Essence, and Black Like Us (2002). In 2001, she published her first book, Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers, a collection of twelve short stories and a novella about Black lesbian dancers. In addition to her writing career, Allegra was an accomplished African folklore and jazz dancer.
Text Source: New York Public Library
Archives
Donna Allegra Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
A Toast of Babatine, Sinister Wisdom 34 →
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was one of the most renowned and celebrated voices in American literature. She was a poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, dancer, historian, filmmaker, sex worker, and civil rights activist. In the mid-fifties, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom. She also worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), under Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership. In the early 1960s, she moved with her son to the continent of Africa, where she lived and worked for various news outlets, as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana. Angelou published her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) to international acclaim and enormous popular success. Her published verse, non-fiction, and fiction include more than 30 bestselling titles, such as Gather Together in My Name (1974), And Still I Rise (1978), and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). Among her accomplishments, Angelou wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia. Her script, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She made numerous television and film appearances, in Alex Haley's Roots (1977) and John Singleton's Poetic Justice (1993), among others. The feature film, Down in the Delta, was Angelou's directorial debut.
Angelou composed and read her poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" at President William (Bill) Clinton's first inaugural ceremony in 1993. Angelou served on two presidential committees; was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008; and has received three Grammy Awards. Despite never attending college, she received over thirty honorary degrees from universities across the nation.
Text Source: New York Public Library.
Archives
Maya Angelou Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg Center) →
Maya Angelou Film & Theater Collection, Wake Forest University →
Digital Resources
Selected Speeches, Iowa State University →
May Ayim
May Ayim (May 3, 1960 - August 9, 1996) a poet, activist, and essayist, was born in Hamburg, Germany in May 1960 to a Ghanaian father and white German mother. She grew up in Münster with a foster family, studied pedagogy in Regensburg, and lived in Berlin from the mid-eighties. Ayim became known for her writings on racism in Germany. A mentee of Audre Lorde, she was one of the founding members of the Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (Initiative of Black Germans/ISD). One of her most popular works is Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (published in English as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), which she published in 1986 with Dagmar Schultz and Katharina Oguntoye. German newspaper Die Tageszeitung called it a "milestone in the Afro-German movement", the work is partially a historical treatise, with the addition of interviews and biographies of Black women across different generations. For example, Ayim writes: "I grew up with the feeling of having to prove that a 'half-breed', a 'negro', an 'orphan' is a full human being." Shortly after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ayim committed suicide in Berlin on August 9, 1996. Prior to her death, she published the poetry collection blues in schwarz weiss (blues in black and white) and her final collection, nacht gesang (night chant), was published posthumously in 1997.
Text Source: Spiegel Magazine Online with translation and additional information by keondra bills freemyn
Archives
May Ayim Archive, Freie Universität Berlin →
Digital Resources
Digital German Women's Archive (in German) →
Remembering Afro-German Intellectual May Ayim, Black Perspectives →
May Ayim Translated Poems from ‘Der Black Atlantic’ →
Hope in My Heart Trailer, Third World Newsreel →
B.
Toni Cade Bambara
Toni Cade Bambara (March 25, 1939–December 9, 1995) began her life in Harlem in the 1940s. She changed her name legally to Toni Cade Bambara in 1970. She earned her Bachelors of Arts degrees from Queens College in both Theatre Arts and English. She studied Commedia dell' Arte at the University of Florence and the École de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris in 1961. Following these experiences, she attended various colleges in New York to study linguistics, dance, and cinema. She obtained a Masters of Arts in American Literature from the City College of New York in 1965. Bambara contributed greatly to African American literature. She was one of the first writers to compile an anthology of African American women's writing, The Black Woman: an Anthology (1970). Perhaps her most noted books are Gorilla, My Love (1972), a collection of short stories, and The Salt Eaters (1980), a novel. She also published African American folklore highlighting the heritage of African story-telling.
In 1959, Bambara won the John Golden Award for Fiction from Queen's College and the Peter Pauper Press Award in Journalism from the Long Island Star. Her first novel, The Salt Eaters, won the 1981 American Book Award and Langston Hughes Society Award. In that same year, she was also awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. She received both the Best Documentary Award from the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters and a Documentary Award from the National Black Programming Consortium in 1986. Throughout her career, she wrote screenplays for films covering a wide range of topics including W.E.B. DuBois, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and Cecil B. Moore. Bambara was also well-known for teaching and community service. She taught at the City College of New York, Scribe Video Centre, Rutgers University, Atlanta University, and Spelman College. She also began to do community work as a caseworker for the New York Department of Welfare. Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died two years later, at age 56, in Philadelphia.
Text Source: Pennsylvania Center for the Book
Archives
Toni Cade Bambara Collection, Spelman College →
Digital Resources
Bambara Reading from Her Work (1985), Library of Congress (Audio) →
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Gwendolyn Bennett
Gwendolyn Bennett (July 8, 1902–May 31, 1981) was born on July 8, 1902, in Giddings, Texas, to Joshua Robin and Mayme (née Abernathy). Bennett spent her early childhood in Washington, D.C. Her parents divorced when she was around four. Joshua kidnapped Bennett in 1910. Father and daughter lived on the run for a lengthy period, moving between Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and New York. Bennett had no further contact with her mother until she was an adult. She attended Brooklyn Girl’s High School and graduated in 1921. Bennett then enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College, while also studying in the university’s fine arts department. While there, Bennett chartered the Rho Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. After two years at Columbia, Bennett transferred to the Pratt Institute.
Bennett published her first poem, “Nocturne,” in the November 1923 issue of Opportunity magazine. She also designed the magazine cover for the Crisis’s December 1923 issue. From 1924 to 1927, she taught art at Howard University, but took a year-long leave in 1925 to study art in Paris on a scholarship. Bennett’s father died on August 13, 1926, shortly after her return from Paris, from a probable suicide. He had been charged with fraud and embezzlement shortly before his death. That summer, Bennett began to design and edit a weekly literary news column for Opportunity. She was forced to resign from Howard, however, in 1927 after she became engaged to a medical student. She next studied art with painter Aaron Douglas at the Alfred C. Barnes Foundation and, after moving to New York, organized a literary society at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now, the Countee Cullen Library) that included head librarian, Ernestine Rose, and Crisis contributor Jessie Redmon Fauset. Bennett was also a contributor and co-editor for Fire!! magazine. Bennett published over twenty poems in the 1920s. She also completed a great deal of artwork, much of which was destroyed in two fires—one at Bennett’s mother-in-law’s home in 1926, and another at her stepdaughter’s home in the early 1980s.
In 1928, Bennett relocated to Eustis, Florida, with her first husband, Alfred J. Jackson, and stopped writing her column. She ceased to publish for several years. Instead, she taught art and Spanish at a local high school. During this 1930s, she struggled with alcoholism. Bennett returned to New York, settling in Hempstead, in 1932. She worked odd jobs before taking a post with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Art Project from 1935–41. In 1936, she directed the Harlem Arts Guild. In 1940, she married Richard Crosscup, a white Harvard graduate and fellow teacher. She was suspended from her post at the Harlem Art Center after coming under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Bennett remained an object of the committee’s scrutiny well into the 1950s. From 1948 to 1968, she worked for the Consumers Union, until she and Crosscup decided to open and operate an antiques shop in Pennsylvania. Bennett died on May 30, 1981, in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Primary Text Source: Academy of American Poetry
Archives
Gwendolyn Bennett Papers (1916-1981), New York Public Library (Schomburg)→
Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, Yale University (Beinecke)→
Digital Resources
Curator Talk: Gwendolyn Bennett’s letters from Paris with Melissa Barton (Yale)→
Created: 12/1/2023; Last Updated: 12/2/2023
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor (1950–) is a poet and teaching artist. She earned an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and an MSW from Fordham University. Her collections of poetry include Raw Air (1997), Night When Moon Follows (2000), Convincing the Body (2005), and Arrival (2017), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. The founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, Boyce-Taylor is also a poetry judge for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She has led workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company. Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award and a VONA fellow.
Text Source: Poetry Foundation
Archives
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Sharon Bridgforth
Sharon Bridgforth (May 15, 1958–) is a writer and playwright who creates ritual/jazz theatre. She was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles at the age of three. Bridgforth received a bachelor's degree in creative writing and broadcast media from California State University at Los Angeles and has served as Artist In-Residence with several arts organizations and universities including: The NoVo Foundation, Brown University, University of Iowa, DePaul University and Northwestern University. Bridgforth has served as a dramaturg for numerous theatres and shows including the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative Maria Bauman-Morales’, Desire: A Sankofa Dream and Ni'Ja Whitson's, Dark Matter Cypher Residency of The Unarrival Experiements. She served as writer and dramaturg for Ananya Chatterjea Dance Theatre's, Fire's of Lost Homes and served as Embedded Writer for Marjani Forte-Saunders’s Memoirs of a…Unicorn residency at Florida State University.
Bridgforth is Executive Producer and host of, Who Yo People Is, a podcast series that gives space to artists whose Work and artistic practices are rooted in serving their communities through healing/Spiritual and cultural traditions, centered in Love. Her publications include: love conjure/blues (2004) and 1998 Lambda Literary Award winning the bull-jean stories. Bridgforth co-edited Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project with her partner Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Lisa Lynn Moore. Bridgforth’s work appears in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora journal, the collection solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays, and in Blacktino Queer Performance. She and Omi Jones co-wrote an essay titled Black Desire, Theatrical Jazz, and River See, which was published in TDR/The Drama Review (Volume 58, Issue 4). In 2018, Bridgforth staged dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home with support from Creative Capital.
Primary Text Source: Sharonbridgforth.com with additional source text from Harvard
Archives
Sharon Bridgforth Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Sharon Bridgforth Youtube Channel →
1999 KFAI Radio Interview (Audio) →
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. She was the author of more than 20 poetry collections, including A Street in Bronzeville (1945); Annie Allen (1949), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and The Bean Eaters (1960). She also published several books of prose, including the novella Maud Martha (1953). Brooks received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the National Medal of Arts. She served as the Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968-2000 and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1985-1986. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Brooks taught creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Text Source: Library of Congress
Archives
Gwendolyn Brooks Papers (In Process), University of Illinois →
Gwendolyn Brooks Papers, University of California Berkeley →
Gwendolyn Brooks Collection 1959-1967, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Audio Recordings at Library of Congress →
Celebrating Brooks at 100 Story Map, University of Illinois →
Octavia E. Butler
Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was one of the best known African American science fiction writers, earning her worldwide critical acclaim. She was born in Pasadena, California in 1947 to Laurice and Octavia M. Butler. Butler's father, a shoeshine man, died when she was very young. Her mother supported her only child through domestic work. Butler's inspiration to enter the realm of science fiction and fantasy writing came at an early age, when she saw the film Devil Girl from Mars on television. It was at that point that she decided she could write a better story. Butler attended Pasadena City College and earned an associate's degree in 1968. The following year, she enrolled in the Screen Writers Guild Open Door program at California State University, Los Angeles. While enrolled in this program, she met fiction writer Harlan Ellison who encouraged Butler to attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop, which she did in 1970. She published her first story, "Crossover," in an anthology of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. Butler published the following works over the span of three decades: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Kindred (1979), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984), Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989), Parable of the Sower (1993), Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), Parable of the Talents (1998), and her final novel, Fledgling (2005). In 1984, Clay's Ark won the James Tiptree Jr. Award; her short story "Speech Sounds" won a Hugo Award; and her short story "Bloodchild" won a Nebula Award. Butler was awarded the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1995, making her the first science fiction writer to receive this grant. Butler moved to Seattle, Washington in 2000 and died from a fall outside of her home in February 2006.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Octavia Butler Papers (1980s), New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
June 2000 Interview with Charlie Rose (Video) →
Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories Exhibit Website, Huntington Library →
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Octavia Butler: Writing Herself Into The Story, NPR Code Switch →
C.
Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was a pioneering African-American writer, actress and director popularly known for her best-selling novel, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, and her plays, most notably "Wedding Band: A Love Story in Black and White." In the 1930s she met and married Alvin Childress, best known for his role as Amos in the television series, Amos and Andy. She was a founding member of the American Negro Theatre, and in 1944 she and her husband Alvin appeared in "Anna Lucasta," alongside lead actress Hilda Simms. When the play went to Broadway, and Childress received a TONY nomination for "Best Supporting Actress."
Although she continued to act, Childress began writing plays in the late 1940s. Her first play, "Florence," appeared in 1949, and a year later, she adapted Langston Hughes' novel, Simple Speaks His Mind into the play, "Just a Little Simple." Her plays include "Gold Through the Trees" (1952), the first play by a Black woman produced in the United States, and "Trouble in Mind" (1955), which received an OBIE for Best Off-Broadway Play; the first black woman to receive that honor. Childress's first book, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life, vignettes that were first published in a column "Conversation from Life," in Paul Robeson's Freedom newspaper, was published a year later. She subsequently republished the vignettes in the Baltimore Afro-American. During this time she divorced Alvin Childress and married musician Nathan (Nat) Woodard in 1957.
Childress's play, "Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White," was produced in 1966 and in 1972, at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre. Her other plays produced during the 1960s included "String," "Wine in the Wilderness," and "Young Martin Luther King." Her award-winning children's book, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, was published in 1973, and was made into a film in 1975. Throughout the following decades, Childress wrote a number of plays which were produced in various venues across the country, ("Gullah," "Let's Hear It for the Queen," "Mojo," "Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne," and "When the Rattlesnake Sounds"), published a novel, A Short Walk, a collection of scenes, ("Black Scenes"), and two children's books, (Rainbow Jordan and Those Other People). Her 1979 novel A Short Walk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Childress was a long-time resident of Roosevelt Island in New York and was instrumental in the opening of the first library on the island in 1979. From
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Alice Childress Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Biographical Timeline, Villanova University →
Alice Childress Didn’t Defang Her Plays, and Producers Said No, New York Magazine→
Alice Childress, Reading from Black Playwright (Video) →
Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Clarke (May 16, 1947–) is a lesbian poet and essayist born and raised in Washington, DC. Her books include By My Precise Haircut (2016), After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), Experimental Love (1993), which was nominated for a 1994 Lambda Literary Award, Humid Pitch (1989), Living as a Lesbian (1986), and Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Belles Lettres, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. She has read her poetry and spoken at venues throughout the United States and served as member of the editorial collective for Conditions magazine. She received a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A., M.S.W., and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Clarke retired from Rutgers University in 2013. She resides in Hobart, New York where she owns Blenheim Hill Books and is the co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
Primary Text Source: Adapted from Poets.org
Additional Text Source: cherylclarkepoet.com
Archives
Cheryl Clarke Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg Center) →
Digital Resources
Pearl Cleage
Pearl Cleage (December 7, 1948–), pronounced cleg, is a fiction writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and journalist. In her writing, Cleage draws on her experiences as an activist for AIDS and women's rights, and she cites the rhythms of Black life as her muse. Cleage's first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was a New York Times best-seller in 1998. Cleage has received numerous awards in recognition of her work, including the Bronze Jubilee Award for Literature in 1983 and the outstanding columnist award from the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists in 1991. In 2013 she was named playwright in residence of Atlanta's Alliance Theatre, and in 2018 she received a Governor's Award for the Arts and Humanities.
Cleage grew up in Detroit, Michigan and studied at Howard University before moving to Atlanta in 1969 to complete her undergraduate studies at Spelman College in playwriting and dramatic literature. She worked as press secretary and speechwriter in the 1970s for Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta and has written columns for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta Tribune. Cleage's theatrical works include “Tell Me My Dream” (2015), “What I Learned in Paris” (2012), “A Song for Coretta” (2007), “Bourbon at the Border” (1997), “Blues for an Alabama Sky” (1995) and “Flyin' West” (1992), among others. She has published over 10 books across many genres including Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot (essays), We Don’t Need No Music (poetry), Dear Dark Faces (poetry), and I Wish I had a Red Dress (fiction).
Primary Text Source: Adapted from New Georgia Encyclopedia
Archives
Pearl Cleage Papers, Emory University →
Digital Resources
Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) was born in Depew, New York. She is the author of 13 poetry collections, including Good Times (1969), Two-Headed Woman (1980), and Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (2000), as well as 22 children’s books and one memoir. Clifton’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Poets, as well as a National Book Award, an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, and the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association. In addition, she was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999-2005, and as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979-1985. Before starting her career as a teacher, Clifton was a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment, Buffalo, and a literature assistant for the Central Atlantic Regional Educational Library in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. Later on, she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, for three years, and a visiting writer at Columbia University School of the Arts for four years, as well as at George Washington University for over 10 years. From 1985-1989, she taught literature and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and then at St. Mary’s College of Maryland as Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities for nearly 20 years. Lucille Clifton died in 2010.
Text Source: Library of Congress
Archives
Lucille Clifton Papers, Emory University →
Digital Resources
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946 – November 22, 2013) was a Watts-born, South Central Los Angeles raised poet, television writer, and essayist. After divorcing her first husband in 1969, Coleman retained custody of their children and struggled to survive and write as a single mother. She worked as an editor for Players, a conscious Black gentleman's magazine, from 1972-1974, and in the mid 1970s, she moved to Hollywood. There, she became an active participant in the spoken word and poetry communities, penning works for Studio Watts and becoming a fixture at Beyond Baroque in Venice. In 1977, she published a chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, followed by a full-length collection of poems, Mad Dog Black Lady (1979) with Black Sparrow Press, beginning a publishing relationship that would last for over thirty years and produce twelve books in various genres. Coleman was also an acclaimed performance artist known for her impactful readings.
In the 1980s, her presence in the L.A. spoken word scene led her to collaborate with seminal punk figures such as Exene Cervenka (X) and Lydia Lunch, and she worked with New Alliance records to release a number of solo and split recordings. Coleman attended Valley Junior College and California State University Los Angeles, and went on to teach at UCLA extension, Cal State Long Beach, Naropa, and Loyola Marymount University. Prolific across genres, Coleman wrote poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction, and plays, as well as scripts for film and television, winning an Emmy for her work on on Days of Our Lives in 1976 and working as a featured columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Coleman is one of the most widely anthologized and published poets of her generation, appearing in prestigious collections such as Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
Her poetry collection Bathwater Wine received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. With her husband of thirty years, poet and visual artist Austin Straus, she hosted the radio show "The Poetry Connexion" from 1981 to 1994. She died November in November 2013. In 2015, the Ascot branch of the Los Angeles public library in South Central, where Coleman spent many of her formative years reading and writing, was renamed the Wanda Coleman Branch in her honor.
Text Source: University of California Los Angeles Library
Archives
Coleman (Wanda) Papers, University of California Los Angeles →
Digital Resources
Kathleen Collins
Kathleen Collins (March 18, 1942–September 18, 1988) was a playwright, filmmaker, director, novelist, short story writer, and professor of film history and production. She was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. and attended Skidmore College, where she was introduced to activism upon joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.). As a member of S.N.C.C., she worked on black southern voter registration. After receiving her bachelor's degree, she earned a master's degree in French literature and cinema at the Middlebury College program at Paris's Sorbonne. From 1967 to 1974, Collins worked as a film editor for various organizations, including the BBC, Craven Films, and William Greaves Productions, among others. She taught in the Theatre Arts Department of City College in New York City from 1974 until her death in 1988.
Collins was the first African American woman to write, direct, and produce a full-length feature film (The Cruz Brothers and Miss. Malloy, 1980, which was based on a Henry Roth novel). Her second feature film, Losing Ground (1982), which she directed and coproduced, was based on her original screenplay and received international acclaim. Also a playwright, her 1982 play, “The Brothers,” was named one of the twelve outstanding plays of the season by the Theatre Communications Group. In 1982 and 1983, she was a finalist for the Susan Blackburn International Prize for Playwriting. Although only a small amount of her work was published before her death in 1988, she wrote six playscripts, over fifteen short stories, and five screenplays. Some of this material was published in two posthumous publications, her short story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016), and Notes from a Black Woman's Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins (2019). Collins died of breast cancer in 1988.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Kathleen Collins Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Kathleen Collins Scripts Collection, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
1984 Lecture at Howard University (Video) →
Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez (May 10, 1934 – December 28, 2012) poet, performance artist, and contributor to the Black Arts Movement, was born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Her books of poetry include On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems (2008), The Beautiful Book (2007), Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002), Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1997), Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1982), Poetic Magnetic (1991), Firespitter (1982), Mouth on Paper (1977), Scarifications (1973), and Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares (1969). Her work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Cortez has also released a number of recordings, many with her band The Firespitters, including Taking the Blues Back Home (1997), Cheerful & Optimistic (1994), Everywhere Drums (1991), and Maintain Control (1986).
In 1964, she founded the Watts Repertory Company, and in 1972, she formed her own publishing company, Bola Press. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, the International African Festival Award, and the American Book Award (1980). She was president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc. and is featured in the films Women in Jazz and Poetry in Motion. Cortez performed, lectured, and taught at many universities, museums, and festivals. She lived in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City. She died in 2012.
Archives
Jayne Cortez Papers (Unprocessed), New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Black Experience in the Arts: Poet and Activist Jayne Cortez, University of Connecticut →
Lectures 1972-1987, University of Connecticut (Audio) →
D.
Margaret Danner
Margaret Danner (January 12, 1915 – January 1, 1984) was born in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, to Caleb and Naomi Danner and spent most of her childhood living in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from Englewood High School in Chicago, Danner attended Loyola University, Roosevelt College, Northwestern University, and YMCA College, studying under poets Paul Eagle and Karl Shapiro. In 1951, Danner became editorial assistant for Poetry: The Magazine of Verse and was promoted to assistant editor in 1956, the first African-American to serve in that position. Danner moved to Detroit in 1959 to join the city's vibrant community of Black writers and artists. She quickly became a part of the "Detroit Group," which included writers such as Danner, Dudley Randall, Oliver LaGrone, Woodie King, Jr., James Thompson and Naomi Long Madgett. In 1962, Danner was named a poet-in-residence at Wayne State University. That same year, Danner talked a local Baptist pastor into lending her an empty parish house to found a cultural center for Black writers, artists and musicians. Boone House became the artistic home of the Detroit group from 1962 to 1964 and hosted visitors such as Robert Hayden, Owen Dodson, and Langston Hughes, who provided crucial support and publicity for several Boone House writers.
Danner’s first collection of poetry was Impressions of African Art Forms (1960), republished by Randall’s Broadside Press in 1961. Other publications by Danner include To Flower: Poems (1963), Iron Lace (1968), Not Light, Nor Bright, Nor Feathery (1968), Poem Counterpoem with Dudley Randall (1969), and The Down of a Thistle: Selected Poems, Prose Poems, and Songs (1976). In 1951 Danner received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship Award and used it to travel to Dakar, Senegal to read her poems at the World Exposition of Negro Arts and to Paris to research an exhibit of African art. Other awards she earned include the Harriet Tubman Award in 1965, the Poets in Concert Award in 1968, and the African Studies Association Award.
In the early 1960’s Danner, along with Robert Hayden, became active in the Baha’i faith which promotes unity, harmony, and peace. From 1964 to 1966, Danner became a touring poet with the sponsorship of the Baha’i Teaching Committee. Danner was a member of the society of Contemporary Artists, Afro-American Culture, National Council of Teachers of English, Nologonyu’s, Boone House, and Chicago Southside Community Art Center. Danner died in 1984 in Chicago, Illinois.
Primary Text Source: University of Chicago; Secondary Text Source: Smethurst et al. in The Cambridge History of African American literature
Archives
Margaret Danner Papers, University of Chicago →
Digital Resources
Photos of Danner and Langston Hughes by Louis Draper, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts →
Margaret Danner and Dudley Randall Read Poem Counterpoem, Williams College (Audio) →
Angela Y. Davis
Angela Yvonne Davis (January 26, 1944–) is a lesbian scholar, prison abolitionist, author, Black feminist philosopher, and one of the most recognized political activists of the 1960s and 1970s. She rose to national attention in 1969 after being removed from her teaching position at the University of California Los Angeles for her membership in the Communist Party at the urging of then California Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1970 Davis was charged as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping and murder. Her arrest sparked an international campaign to gain her release. In 1972, after a high-profile trial, she was acquitted of all charges. Davis was the Vice Presidential candidate for the Communist Party of the United States in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections.
Davis is an advocate for incarcerated people’s rights and a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex. She writes and lectures on social injustice, social movements, and the intersections of race, gender, and class. She has published many books including Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1983), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (1999), Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (2005), The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (2012), and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016).
Text Source: Harvard University
Archives
Angela Davis Papers, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Digital Resources
2020 Conversation with Girl Trek featuring Nikki Giovanni (Video) →
Alexis De Veaux
Alexis De Veaux (September 24, 1948–) is a lesbian writer, playwright, and illustrator, and scholar. Born in 1948, in Harlem, De Veaux received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York Empire State College. She continued her education in creative writing at the University of Buffalo, where she earned Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. A voice for Black feminism and LGBTQ equality, De Veaux’s writings often reflect the racial and sexual experiences of Black female characters.
Throughout her career, she has been part of the Black feminist movement and the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. Her work has been heavily influenced by these movements. Working in multiple genres, De Veaux has been the recipient of a number of literary awards including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Biography, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction. She was a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence magazine from 1979 to 1991 and traveled throughout Africa for the magazine. In 1990, on assignment from Essence, De Veaux was the first North American to interview Nelson Mandela after his release from prison. De Veaux’s published works include books Na-Ni (1973), Spirits in the Street (1973), Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980) Blue Heat: Poems and Drawings (1985), An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987), The Woolu Hat (1995), Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004), Yabo (2014), and a number of short stories. Her plays have been anthologized and produced off-Broadway and in regional theaters across the country.
As an artist and lecturer, she has traveled extensively throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, Japan, and Europe; and is recognized for her contributions to such organizations as MADRE, an international women's self-help organization; SISA (Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa); the Brooklyn-based performance collective, Flamboyant Ladies Theater Company (co-founded with actress Gwendolen Hardwick; 1979-1986); the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA); the Buffalo Quarters Historical Society; Just Buffalo Literary Center; the Arts Council of Buffalo and Erie County; and the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS).
Additional Text Source: Uncrowned Community Builders
Archives
Alexis De Veaux Papers, Amistad Research Center →
Alexis De Veaux Plays and Papers (Partially Processed), New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
2014 Interview, Hobart Festival of Women Writers (Video) →
2017 Conversation with Bernice McFadden, Amistad Research Center (Video) →
Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an African American performing artist, writer, and activist. Her work spanned the mediums of film, television, radio, and theatre. With her husband, Ossie Davis, she published a joint memoir, as well as independently wrote collections of poetry and essays, articles, books for children, plays, and speeches. Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922. Her family moved to Harlem soon after she was born. Dee earned a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City, where she studied French and Spanish. Between 1940 and 1945, she apprenticed with the American Negro Theatre which occupied the basement stage of the 135th Street Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Dee made her stage debut in a production of Abram Hill's On Strivers Row in 1940. The following year she married the blues singer, Frankie Dee, retaining his name after they divorced in 1945.
In 1959, Dee was cast opposite Sidney Poitier in the lead role of Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, which was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. Dee's writing debut came in 1979, with “Take it from the Top,” which was directed by Davis. She edited the Young Adult anthology Glowchild, as well as wrote or adapted several stage plays, including “The Stepmother, John Boscoe and the Devil” (1981), “Zora is my Name” (1983), “Aunt Zurletha” (1985), and Rosa Guy’s “The Disappearance” (1993). Ms. Dee also authored two children’s books, Tower to Heaven and Two Ways to Count to Ten; a book of poetry and short stories, My One Good Nerve in 1996 (which she adapted into a solo performance piece); and With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, a joint autobiography co-authored with her late husband. The audio version of their autobiography was awarded a Grammy in 2007.
Dee was an activist throughout her life, and prominent in the civil rights movement. The couple was close to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and were instrumental in fundraising and publicizing his work and that of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were organizers and fundraisers for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and from the mid 1950s onwards, they were closely involved with the labor union Local 1199. Additionally, Dee was awarded two Emmys, an Obie, a Drama Desk Award, and an Oscar nomination for her performance in American Gangster. She died in June 2014, at home in New Rochelle, New York.
Primary Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Secondary Text Source: OssieandRuby.com
Archives
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Photos of Ruby Dee, Detroit Public Library →
Ruby Dee on Writing, 1993 Interview with Kelvin Allen (Video) →
Eva B. Dykes
Eva Beatrice Dykes (August 13, 1893–October 29, 1986) was born in Washington, D.C., where she graduated from the M Street High School and Howard University. With the encouragement of her uncle, Dr. James Howard, she continued her education at Radcliffe College. Like other historically Black colleges and universities at that time, Howard was not nationally accredited, a function of limited resources and racist policies. Thus, when Dykes entered Harvard, she was required to earn a second bachelor’s degree before beginning graduate studies. At Radcliffe, she received an A.B. and A.M. as well as a doctorate in English philology. She was, with Sadie Alexander and Georgiana Simpson, one of the three first Black women to earn Ph.D. degrees in the United States (1921).
Dykes taught at Walden University, Dunbar (formerly M street) High School, then at Howard University for 15 years, where she was voted the best all-around teacher in the university by the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts. Having become a Seventh-Day Adventist, she combined her religious conviction and her academic interests by accepting an invitation in 1944 to teach at Oakwood College, a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Huntsville, Alabama. She played a significant role in the college's efforts to achieve accreditation and expand its curriculum. In 1973 she was honored by having the college library named for her. She studied music from the age of five and was pianist, organist, and choir director, as well as the author of several books, including The Negro in English Romantic Thought. She served as associate editor of Howard Alumnus magazine and wrote a long-standing column for the The Message Magazine, a publication of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
Adapted from Black Women Oral History Project, Radcliffe Institute
Archives
Eva B Dykes Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University)
Digital Resources
Black Women Oral History Project →
The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Book) →
Eva Dykes Profile - Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery →
Added 3/8/23; Last updated 3/8/23
G.
Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni (June 7, 1943–) grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Knoxville, Tennessee, and in 1960 she entered Nashville’s Fisk University. By 1967, when she received a B.A., she was firmly committed to the civil rights movement and the concept of black power. Entering the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement, Nikki Giovanni quickly became one of America’s most widely read poets. Truth Is On Its Way, a recording of her poems recited to gospel music, was one of the best-selling albums in the country in 1971. Named woman of the year by three magazines, including Ebony, and recipient of a host of honorary doctorates and awards, Nikki Giovanni has read from her work and lectured at colleges around the country.
Giovanni has published over 30 books of poetry and essays including: Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement (1968); Gemini (1971), finalist for the National Book Award for biography; My House (1972); Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1973); The Women and the Men (1975); Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978); Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983); Sacred Cows… and Other Edibles (1988), Racism 101 (1994), Love Poems (1997), Bicycles (2009), and Chasing Utopia (2013). Giovanni’s experiences as a single mother then began to influence her poetry. Spin a Soft Black Song (1971), Ego-Tripping (1973), Vacation Time (1980), The Sun Is So Quiet (1996), and I Am Loved (2018) were collections of poems for children. Giovanni was nominated for a Grammy award for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection in 2004. In 1970, Giovanni founded a publishing cooperative, NikTom, Ltd. that supported the work of Black women writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Mari Evans, Carolyn Rodgers, and Margaret Walker. Giovanni resides in Virginia with her longtime partner, Virginia Fowler, and serves as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech.
Primary Text Source: Furious Flower
Additional Text Source: Brittanica
Archives
Nikki Giovanni Papers, Boston University →
Digital Resources
1971 Conversation with James Baldwin on SOUL! (Video) →
Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez (September 11, 1948–) is a lesbian Cape Verdean/Ioway/Wampanoag writer and activist and author of the double Lambda Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories (1991). Her adaptation of the book for the stage Bones & Ash: A Gilda Story was performed by the Urban Bush Women company in 13 U.S. cities. She is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two California Arts Council fellowships and an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She attended Northeastern University for college, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971 and pursued a Master of Science in Journalism at Columbia University, graduating in 1973. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as Home Girls, Reading Black Reading Feminist, Dark Matter, and the Oxford World Treasury of Love Stories. She served on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and was an original member of the boards of the Astraea Foundation and the Open Meadows Foundation.
In addition to The Gilda Stories, she has published three collections of poetry: The Lipstick Papers (1980), Flamingoes and Bears (1986), and Oral Tradition (1995). She co-edited a fantasy fiction anthology entitled Swords of the Rainbow and selected the fiction for The Best Lesbian Erotica of 1997. She is also the author a book of personal and political essays entitled Forty-Three Septembers (1993) and a collection of short fiction, Don’t Explain (1997). Gomez is also a playwright, staging Waiting for Giovanni (2010) about James Baldwin and Leaving the Blues (1997) about singer Alberta Hunter in theaters across the United States. Formerly the executive director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University she has also worked in philanthropy for many years.
Text Source: Jewelle Gomez Official Website
Archives
Jewelle Gomez Papers, San Francisco Public Library →
Jewelle Gomez Papers, New York Public Library →
Digital Resources
Marriage Announcement, New York Times
Reading for Golden Crown Literary Society, Library of Congress (Video) →
Lorna Goodison
Lorna Goodison (August 1, 1947–) is a Caribbean poet, born in Kingston, Jamaica. A painter before she turned her focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art Students League in New York. Her numerous poetry collections include Tamarind Season (1980), Heartease (1988), Traveling Mercies (2001), Controlling the Silver (2005), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006) and Supplying Salt and Light (2013). She is also the author of the short story collections Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005) and By Love Possessed (2011), as well as the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the BC (British Columbia) National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a finalist for both the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Her work is also featured in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (third edition, 2003), the Longman Anthology of British Literature (third edition, 2006) and the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996).
Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. A member of the Jamaican National Commission to UNESCO, Goodison was awarded Jamaica’s Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999. She also received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas for her second book of poetry, I am Becoming My Mother (1986). Goodison has also been awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. Lorna Goodison was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica for 2017-2020.Professor of English and of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison divides her time between Ann Arbor, Toronto, and the north coast of Jamaica.
Primary Text Source: Poetry Foundation
Additional Text Source: Carcanet
Archives
Lorna Goodison Papers, University of Toronto →
Digital Resources
Readings, University of Miami →
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Rosa Guy
Rosa Guy (September 21, 1922–June 3, 2012), pronounced ghee, was a Trinidadian-American writer who drew on her own experiences to create fiction for young adults that usually concerned individual choice, family conflicts, poverty, and the realities of life in urban America and the West Indies. Guy lived in Trinidad until 1932, when she moved to the United States to join her parents, who had already immigrated. She grew up in New York City’s Harlem. At age 14, after both of her parents died, she began work in a factory, and in 1941 she married Walter Guy. She eventually studied writing at New York University and became active in the American Negro Theatre. In the late 1940s, after the dissolution of her marriage, Guy cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild and focused on her fiction. Guy’s first novel, Bird at My Window (1966), is set in Harlem and examines the relationship between black mothers and their children, as well as the social forces that foster the demoralization of black men. Children of Longing (1970), which Guy edited, contains accounts of black teens’ and young adults’ firsthand experiences and aspirations. After the publication of these works, she traveled in the Caribbean and lived in Haiti and Trinidad.
Guy became best known for a frank coming-of-age trilogy that featured The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978). Ruby is regarded as the first young adult novel to feature a lesbian protagonist. She also wrote a number of books centering on Imamu Jones, a young African American detective in Harlem; the series included The Disappearance (1979), New Guys Around the Block (1983), and And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987). Among her other works are A Measure of Time (1983), Paris, Pee Wee, and Big Dog (1984), My Love, My Love; or, The Peasant Girl (1985, on which the successful 1990 Broadway musical Once on This Island was based), The Ups and Downs of Carl David III (1989), Billy the Great (1991), and The Music of Summer (1992). The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995), a novel for adults, centers on an American artist living in Haiti who reexamines her troubled past. Rosa Guy’s work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation (for The Friends, in 1973), the Coretta Scott King Award, and the American Library Association′s Best Book for Young Adults Award. Once on This Island was nominated for eight Tony Awards.
Primary Text Source: Brittanica.com
Additional Text Source: Harlem World Magazine
Archives
Rosa Guy Collection, Boston University →
Correspondence with Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Rosa Guy Obituary by Margaret Busby, The Guardian →
Interview by Louise Meriwether, Alexander Street (Subscription) →
H.
Virginia Hamilton
Virginia Esther Hamilton (March 12, 1936–February 19, 2002) was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1936. Tales told by her parents and other family members during her youth helped her develop an appreciation of storytelling as a way to preserve cultural heritage. During her career as a children’s writer, Virginia Hamilton produced original folktales and retellings, contemporary novels, mysteries, fantasy books, and nonfiction. Common to all these works was the author’s interest in and respect for African American experiences, history, and culture. In her lifetime, Virginia wrote and published 41 books in multiple genres that spanned picture books and folktales, mysteries and science fiction, realistic novels and biography. Virginia described her work as “Liberation Literature.” She won every major award in youth literature.
Virginia graduated at the top of her high-school class and received a full scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. In 1956, she transferred to the Ohio State University in Columbus and majored in literature and creative writing. She moved to New York City in 1958, working as a museum receptionist, cost accountant, and nightclub singer, while she pursued her dream of being a published writer. She studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research. In 1960 she married poet Arnold Adoff. Her first book, Zeely, was published in 1967.
M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) won the 1975 Newbery Medal and the National Book Award, making it the first work to receive both honors. The novel tells of a boy who searches for a way to protect his family from a strip miner’s spoil heap without having to move from their cherished mountain home. Hamilton’s Newbery Honor Books include The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), and In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World (1988). Among Hamilton’s other fictional works are the young adult novels A Little Love (1984) and Cousins (1990); the folktale collections The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985), The All Jahdu Storybook (1991), and Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995); and the fantasy trilogy of Justice and Her Brothers (1978), Dustland (1980), and The Gathering (1981).
Many of Hamilton’s works received prestigious awards. Among these were The House of Dies Drear (1968), which received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery in 1969. Hamilton also earned the Coretta Scott King Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award several times. In 1995, Hamilton received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. She was the first children’s author to be so honored. Hamilton wrote the biographies W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (1972) and Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man (1974). In Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988), Hamilton blends factual accounts of the main character’s trial with fictional accounts of his youth. Continuing her desire to bring African American history into mainstream children’s literature, she researched and retold slave narratives for Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom (1992).
In recognition of her contributions to children’s literature, Hamilton received the Regina Medal in 1990, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1992, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1995. Kent State University in Ohio established an annual conference on multicultural experiences in children’s literature in Hamilton’s honor in 1984. After a long battle with breast cancer, Hamilton died on February 19, 2002, in Dayton, Ohio.
Text Sources: Britannica Kids and Virginia Hamilton Official Website
Archives
Virginia Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress
Digital Resources
“Snipets” Television Program, 1980, Internet Archive (Video)→
Virginia Hamilton: America’s Storyteller - Biography for Young Readers (Book) →
Virginia Hamilton Official Website→
Added 12/3/23; Last updated 12/3/23
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930–January 12, 1965) was a playwright, essayist, poet, and civil rights activist. She is best known for writing "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. Hansberry was born into a family that was active in the Black community of Chicago. She was raised in an atmosphere suffused with activism and intellectual rigor. Visitors to her childhood home included such Black luminaries as Duke Ellington, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Jesse Owens. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years and she briefly attended the Art Institute in Chicago, where she studied painting. Desiring to pursue her longtime interest in writing and theater, she then moved to New York to attend the New School for Social Research. She also began work for Paul Robeson's progressive black newspaper Freedom, first as a writer and then an associate editor. She attended the Intercontinental Peace Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1952, when Paul Robeson was denied a passport to attend.
Hansberry’s first play, "A Raisin in the Sun," opened on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959. The play, with themes both universally human and specifically about racial discrimination and sexist attitudes, was successful and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Within two years, it was translated into 35 different languages and was performed all over the world. Lorraine Hansberry was commissioned to write a television drama on slavery, which she completed as "The Drinking Gourd," but it was not produced. Moving with her husband Robert Nemiroff to Croton-on-Hudson, Lorraine Hansberry continued not only her writing but also her involvement with civil rights and other political protests. In 1964, "The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality" was published for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) with text by Hansberry. She was the first black playwright and youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. She and her words were the inspiration for Nina Simone's song "To Be Young Gifted and Black." In 2017, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Archives
Lorraine Hansberry Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg Center) →
Richard Hoffman - Lorraine Hansberry Collection, University of Delaware →
Digital Resources
Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust →
Lorraine Hansberry Biographical Timeline, PBS American Masters →
Della Hardman
Della Brown Taylor Hardman (May 20, 1922–December 13, 2005) was an arts educator and journalist from Charleston, West Virginia. Hardman attended West Virginia State College, earning her B.S. degree in education in 1943, her M.A. degree in arts education from Boston University and her Ph.D. degree from Kent State University in 1994 at age 72. She worked at Boston Public Schools for two years. In 1956, Hardman was appointed associate professor of art at West Virginia State College. During her thirty years at West Virginia State College, she also lectured at other universities and art galleries. Hardman was an active member of numerous organizations including the National Art Education Association and the Charleston Art Gallery, where she served as chairman of the board of trustees. Hardman was recognized as the Outstanding Art Educator by the NAEA and named commissioner of the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council by Governor John D. Rockefeller. Hardman retired to Martha’s Vineyard where she wrote the Oak Bluffs column for the Vineyard Gazette for seven years. Hardman passed away in Martha’s Vineyard in December 2005 at age 83.
Text Source: Boston University
Archives
Della Brown Taylor Collection, Boston University →
Digital Resources
Profile from 2002, Vineyard Gazette →
bell hooks
bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021), born Gloria Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky was an activist, poet, intellectual, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. hooks authored over 30 books, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 20 most influential books published in 20 years; Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984); Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1991), winner of the American Book Award/Before Columbus Foundation Award; Teaching to Transgress (1994); the children’s book Homemade Love (2002), named the Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year; and the poetry collections And There We Wept (1978) and When Angels Speak Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Award. Throughout her life, hooks explored the relationship between sexism, racism, and economic disparity in books aimed at scholars and at the public. hooks won the Writer’s Award from the Lila-Wallace—Reader’s Digest Fund, and was named one of the United States’s leading public intellectuals by The Atlantic Monthly. She earned a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Throughout her career, she taught at USC, Yale University, Oberlin College, the City College of New York, and Berea College, among others.
Text Source: Poetry Foundation
Archives
bell hooks Archive, Berea College →
Digital Resources
Year of bell hooks, St. Norbert College →
In Praise of bell hooks, New York Times →
2014 talk with Gloria Steinem at Eugene Lang College (Video) →
Last Updated: 12/1/2023
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891–January 28, 1960) was the author of novels, plays, short stories, scholarly studies of African-American, Haitian, and Jamaican folklore, and autobiographical writing. Zora Neale Hurston is among the most celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s warmth and charm along with her vibrant personality made her one of the best-liked members of the 1920s Harlem literary elite or “niggerati,” a group which included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Dorothy West, and Nella Larsen. Hurston was raised in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, though she moved north at eighteen. She spent a year at Howard University studying with the influential African-American scholar Alain Locke. It was at Howard that Hurston’s earliest stories were published, in the university’s literary magazine and in Opportunity, from which she received an award for her story “Spunk” in 1925. From Howard she went on to New York to attend Barnard College on a scholarship. Though she continued writing at Barnard, Hurston also studied anthropology and folklore. After completing her bachelor’s degree, Hurston received a grant to travel throughout the American south studying African-American folk traditions. This research led to numerous scholarly articles and the book Mules and Men.
Hurston incorporated her research into her novels about southern African Americans, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She wrote dramatic pieces, too, and contributed work to African-American revues. Additional works include Tell My Horse (1938), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). She collaborated briefly with Langston Hughes on a play, Mule Bone. The project led to a deep conflict between the two writers and wasn’t produced until the 1991, when it played at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York. Hurston returned to Eatonville toward the end of her life. She withdrew from the literary scene and worked as a domestic in the home of a white family. She died in St. Lucie County, Florida in relative obscurity. Hurston’s work returned to popularity in the 1970s in large part through the efforts of Alice Walker.
Text Source: Adapted from Yale Beinecke Library
Archives
Zora Neale Hurston Collection, University of Florida →
Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Yale University (Beinecke) →
Ethnographic Collection, American Folklife Center →
Zora Neale Hurston Plays, Library of Congress →
Digital Resources
Zora Neale Hurston Trust Official Website →
Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive, University of Central Florida→
I.
Gwen Ifill
Gwen Ifill (September 29, 1955–November 14, 2016) Gwen Ifill was a journalist, television news correspondent, and news program moderator. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications from Simmons College in 1977, and went to work at the Boston Herald-American as a reporter after her graduation. Interested in politics, she took a position in Baltimore for the Evening Sun, where she hosted her first news show for the local television station. Ifill later took posts reporting for The Washington Post and The New York Times, before becoming a congressional correspondent for NBC News in 1994. In 1999, PBS hired Ifill, where she worked on both NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, as a senior correspondent, and Washington Week , where she served as moderator and managing editor. In 2004, Gwen Ifill became the first African-American woman to moderate a vice-presidential debate, and she moderated the 2008 vice-presidential debate as well. Her book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama was published in 2009. In 2013, Ifill and Judy Woodruff became co-anchors and co-managing editors of NewsHour , becoming the first female team to anchor a network news program. Ifill received several honors including a Peabody Award (2008), Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, and induction into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame Over the course of her career, Gwen Ifill was awarded over 35 honorary degrees. She was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She died of cancer on November 2016, at the age of 61.
Text Source: Adapted from Simmons College
Archives
Gwen Ifill Papers, Simmons College →
Digital Resources
J.
Gertrude Hadley Jeannette
Gertrude Hadley Jeannette (November 28, 1914–April 4, 2018) was a playwright, actor, director, and producer. Additionally, she is believed to be the first woman to get a taxi license and drive a cab in New York City. Born in Urbana, Arkansas, Jeannette met her future husband, Joe Jeannette, a heavyweight boxer 35 years her senior, on prom night. In 1933, they eloped and moved to New York, where she began working as a taxi driver. She also enrolled in shorthand classes at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where she met Frederick O'Neal, one of the founders of the American Negro Theater. Upon his recommendation, she enrolled in a speech class, held at the Theater, to correct a childhood stammer. Acting was part of the speech therapy curriculum. Since Jeannette had to learn the map of New York City in order to drive a taxi, she realized that she only had to read a script once or twice to know her lines. The American Negro Theater required its students to audition and Jeannette soon became known for her stage presence. She acted alongside such notable figures as Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier. She was cast in her first Broadway production, Lost in the Stars, in 1948. She would subsequently act in other Broadway productions, including The Long Dream (1960), The Amen Corner (1965), and Vieux Carré (1977), among others. She also found roles in film, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Shaft (1971).
In response to what she saw as a lack of authentic black characters in the theater, Jeannette began writing plays in 1950. She wrote five plays altogether including:The Way Forward (1948-1950), A Bolt from the Blue (1950), Light in the Cellar (1960), a sequel to This Way Forward, Who's Mama's Baby, Who's Daddy's Child (1985), and Gladys' Dilemma (1990). Also around 1950, during the time of the Second Red Scare, the American Negro Theater closed and Jeannette was barred from working because of her association with Paul Robeson, a singer, actor, and political activist (Jeannette's husband was a bodyguard of sorts for Robeson). Instead of heading to Hollywood like many of her acting peers, she took over a space at the Elks Building, calling it the Elks Community Theater. In 1979, she founded another theater company that would be known as the HADLEY (Harlem Artist's Development League Especially for You) Players. In addition to directing many of the Players productions and overseeing its operations, she transformed her two plays, This Way Forward and Light in the Cellar, into a novel, The Secret in the Cellar, which was published in 2006. Jeannette received numerous awards and accolades during her lifetime including the Paul Robeson Award from Actors' Equity. She continued to act into her 80s and retired from directing at 98. She died at age 103 in April 2018.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Gertrude Hadley Jeannette Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
1995 Foundry Theatre Interview (Video) →
2012 Birthday Tribute by Hon. Charles B. Rangel, Congressional Record →
Helene Johnson
Helene Johnson (July 7, 1906–July 7, 1995) was one of the minor poets of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, educated in the public schools of that city and at Boston University. Johnson was the youngest of the African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She published approximately twenty-five poems which appeared in such magazines as "Opportunity" "Fire!!" and "Vanity Fair" as well as in The New Negro. Her writings usually were concerned with Black working class life and a strong identification with her racial heritage.
Johnson and her cousin Dorothy West, who would become a successful Harlem Renaissance novelist, were drawn to the vibrancy of Harlem and moved to New York in the mid-1920s. The two women enrolled in Columbia University where they took classes to develop their writing skills. Johnson was once praised as one of the most-talented voices of the Harlem Renaissance and was compared in form and style to Langston Hughes. However, her dreams of motherhood and family became her priority when she married William Hubbell in 1933. In 1935, Johnson’s last published poems appeared in Challenge: A Literary Quarterly. Once she completed her courses at Columbia, her life consisted of focusing on her marriage and family. Johnson’s contribution to published poetry declined, and her presence was practically erased from the public’s eye.
Primary Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Secondary Text Source: University of Minnesota
Archives
Helene Johnson Poems 1972-1979, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Claudia Jones
Claudia Jones (February 21, 1915–December 24, 1964) was a political activist, communist, journalist, and community leader, was born in Trinidad and immigrated to the U.S. in 1924, with her parents and siblings. During the 1930s and 1940s, she became a strong advocate for human, civil, and women's rights and rose in the Communist Party-USA to a position of leadership. She was appointed editor of Negro Affairs for the Daily Worker in 1948, and that same year, she was arrested for violation of the Smith Act. Between 1948 and 1955, Jones was arrested and imprisoned twice and finally deported to England in December 1955, after serving a sentence of a year and a day at the Aldersen Federal Women's Prison.
From 1955 to 1964, Jones worked with London's African-Caribbean community doing political and cultural organizing. She founded and edited The West Indian Gazette and the Afro-Asian Caribbean News, and in 1959, helped organize a series of cultural events that grew to become the Notting Hill Carnival. Jones died on December 24, 1964, after a long illness.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Claudia Jones Research Collection, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Claudia Jones Memorial Collection, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Correspondence with Abhimanyu (Manu) Manchanda, Marx Memorial Library →
Digital Resources
Transcripts of Correspondence with Former Partner Abhimanyu (Manu) Manchanda →
Claudia Jones Memorial Photograph Collection, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Subject File, Federal Bureau of Investigation →
Gayl Jones
Gayl Jones (November 23, 1949–) was born to Franklin and Lucille Jones in Lexington, Kentucky. After graduating from Henry Clay High School, Jones enrolled at Connecticut College. In 1971, Jones received her B.A. degree in English. She was then accepted into the graduate creative writing program at Brown University, where two years later she earned her M.A. degree in creative writing. By 1975, she had earned her Doctorate of Arts degree in creative writing from Brown and had her first play, Chile Woman, produced. Although she has written poetry, short stories, plays, and critical essays, Jones is best known for her novels. While at Brown, Jones studied under poet Michael Harper, who introduced her first novel Corregidora (1975) to Toni Morrison, who became her editor. Following graduation, Jones’ second novel, Eva’s Man (1976), was published. She taught briefly at Wellesley College, then became an assistant professor of English and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, Jones published a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977), a volume-length poem Songs for Anninho (1981), and another volume of poetry, The Hermit-Woman (1983). Jones also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Society of Fellows. She met and married Robert Higgins, a politically active student, who eventually took her last name.
Because of legal problems, Jones and Higgins left the United States in the early 1980s and moved to Paris, France for a self-imposed, five-year exile. During this time, Jones published another novel, Die Volgelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) (1986) in Germany, as well as a collection of poetry, Xarque and Other Poems (1985), in the United States. Her first book of criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991), was published soon after Jones and her husband returned to the United States in 1988. After living privately in Lexington for 10 years, Jones published her novel, The Healing (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel, Mosquito, was published in 1999.
Jones work has at times been overshadowed by news coverage of incidents resulting from Higgins’ mental illness. He committed suicide in 1998 after a standoff with Lexington Police, and Jones hasn’t appeared in public since. Still, her work continues to awe readers with its complex style and depth of emotion.
Text Source: Carnegie Center Lexington
Archives
The Gayl Jones Collection, Boston University →
Correspondence with Melvin Dixon →
Digital Resources
Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold, New York Times Magazine →
The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know, The Atlantic →
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
An Interview with Gayl Jones, Oct. 1992, Callaloo (Free with Registration) →
June Jordan
June Jordan (July 9, 1936-June 14, 2002) was a bisexual poet, activist, journalist, essayist and teacher. Prolific and passionate, she was an influential voice who lived and wrote on the frontlines of American poetry, international political vision and human moral witness. June Jordan was the author of more than twenty-five major works of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as numerous children's books. Born in Harlem in 1936, Jordan was the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, who raised her in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where she began writing poetry at the age of seven. In her teens, she attended the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, and in 1953 enrolled at Barnard College, where she would earn her B.A. She was married in 1955, and divorced after having one child. Jordan was active in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar and gay and lesbian rights movements, even as she became known as a writer. In 1967, after running poetry workshops for children in Harlem, Jordan began her teaching career at the City College of New York. She taught at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College, and became a professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she directed The Poetry Center. In 1988, she was appointed professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded the influential poetry program Poetry For the People. Jordan earned numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo residency (1979), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1982) and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists (1984), and a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.
Archives
June Jordan Collection, Harvard University (Schlesinger) →
Digital Resources
Last updated 4/18/2023.
K.
Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy (September 13, 1931–), playwright, educator and daughter of Cornell Wallace Hawkins and Etta Haugabook Hawkins, was born on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, PA. Kennedy grew up in Cleveland, OH, where her parents moved four years after her birth. She received her B.A. from Ohio State University in 1952, and married Joseph C. Kennedy on May 15, 1953, with whom she had two sons, Joseph Jr. and Adam. After moving to New York, Kennedy studied creative writing at Columbia University (1954-1956), American Theatre Wing (1958), and later with Edward Albee at Circle-in-the-Square School (1962). She has also taught creative writing at Yale University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Davis.
Kennedy is an African-American dramatist whose early works utilize a surrealist perspective. Though she has mentioned Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca as two of her favorite playwrights, at least one critic has noted a kinship with Jean Cocteau in certain of her works. Her richly symbolic plays deal with racial, sexual, and religious themes, and are often "disarmingly autobiographical." Kennedy calls her plays "states of mind," written while images "fiercely pound in (her) head." Frequently the characters and images that appear in her plays are drawn from the mythical and historical past, or from her own memories and dreams. The landscape of her plays has been peopled by figures as unlikely as Queen Victoria, Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Galileo, Beethoven, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Shelley Winters, and even rats (in A Rat's Mass, inspired by a particularly vivid dream). Powerful African and African-American figures in her work include Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, and sniper James Essex.
Kennedy's best known play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, was begun in 1961 while traveling in Africa, and was the first of her plays to be produced. It opened off-Broadway in 1964 with great success and won an Obie Award. During the next several years, Kennedy was the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants (Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Arts, etc.), writing a number of plays, most of which were professionally produced in major theaters in the United States and Europe. Among her plays are The Owl Answers (1963), A Rat's Mass (1966), The Lennon Play: in His Own Write (1967), Lesson in a Dead Language (1968), A Beast's Story (1969), An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), She Talks to Beethoven (1989), and Ohio State Murders (1990). In 1996, she co-wrote Sleep Deprivation Chamber with her son Adam P. Kennedy, and in 2018 she premiered He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box at Theatre for a New Audience. She has also written children's plays (Black Children's Day and A Lancashire Lad, both 1980), a novella (Deadly Triplets, 1990), and a memoir (People Who Led to My Plays, 1987). Published collections of her works include Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (1988), The Alexander Plays (1992), and The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (2001). Kennedy made her Broadway debut in 2022 at the age of 91 with Ohio State Murders, featuring Audra McDonald as the lead. Adapted from University of Texas
Archives
Adrienne Kennedy Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas →
Digital Resources
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Adrienne Kennedy Interviewed by Canaan Kennedy, her grandson (2015) →
Adrienne Kennedy Interviewed by Suzan-Lori Parks (1996) →
Added 5/12/2023 Last Updated 5/14/2023
Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid (May 25, 1949–) is an Antiguan American novelist, essayist, horticulturist, and journalist. Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua. At the age of 17, Kincaid left Antigua for New York where she worked as an au pair. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full-scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year Kincaid dropped out of school, returned to New York, and began writing for teenage girls’ magazine Ingenue and The Village Voice and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. She became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1976 and a featured columnist for the highly visible “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine for the next nine years. In 1978, Kincaid’s first piece of fiction was published in the New Yorker, and it later became part of her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983). It was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Morton Darwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two years later, in 1985, Kincaid published her first novel, Annie John. For her work on Annie John, Kincaid was selected as one of three finalists for the 1985 international Ritz Paris Hemingway Award. In addition, Kincaid is a recipient of the Anifield-Wolf Book Award and The Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Award. Kincaid also received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Award for My Brother, a chronicle of her relationship with her youngest brother during his losing battle with AIDS. In 1988, Kincaid published A Small Place, a nonfiction work examining the brutal effects of Antiguan colonial oppression that relentlessly indicts its white perpetrators. Kincaid’s other major works include Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Garden (1999), Mr. Potter (2002) and See Now Then (2013). Kincaid is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Text Source: University of Minnesota
Archives
Jamaica Kincaid Papers, Harvard University (Houghton) →
Digital Resources
L.
Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891–March 30, 1964) was a Harlem Renaissance writer, librarian, and nurse. She was born in Chicago in 1893 to a white Danish mother and a Black West Indian father. Two years later, after her father died, her mother married a Dane. Educated in Chicago, at sixteen Larsen travelled to Denmark and remained for three years. After a year of study at Fisk University, she attended the University of Copenhagen, and later returned to the United States where she graduated from the Lincoln Hospital Training Program in New York (1915). Larsen married Elmer S. Imes, an African American physicist in 1919, and became associated with the cultural awakening in Harlem, known as the Harlem Renaissance. From 1921-1926 she worked as a children's librarian at the 135 Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
Larsen's first short story was published in 1926, and her two novels quickly followed: Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). The following year she became the first African American woman to win a Guggenheim award for creative writing. Her books are autobiographical in nature, dealing with identity and marginality and explore the consciousness and psychology of female character. An unsubstantiated charge of plagiarism and her divorce in 1933 ended Larsen's career as one of the Harlem Renaissance's major novelists. Her nursing career began in 1941 and she worked as a nurse in several hospitals in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Larsen died in relative obscurity in 1964.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Larsen did not leave behind papers, but images and correspondence can be found at Yale.
Nella Larsen in the Dorothy Peterson Collection, Yale University (Beinecke) →
Digital Resources
Biographic Profile in American Writers A Collection of Literary Biographies →
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934-November 17, 1992) was born in New York City. She is the author of 12 poetry collections, including Coal (1976), The Black Unicorn (1978), and The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997). She is also the author of five volumes of prose, including The Cancer Journals (1980), which won the 1982 Gay Caucus Book of the Year award; and A Burst of Light (1988), which won a National Book Award. Lorde received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Artists Public Service Program, as well as the Broadside Poets Award from Broadside Press, the Borough of Manhattan President’s Award for literary excellence, and the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. From 1961-1968, Lorde was a librarian in New York City schools. She served as a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and taught at John Jay College and Hunter College. Lorde was a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa.
Text Source: Library of Congress
Archives
Audre Lorde Collection, Spelman College Archives →
Audre Lorde Archive, Freie Universität Berlin →
Audre Lorde Audio Collection, Lesbian Herstory Archives →
Digital Resources
M.
Janet McDonald
Janet Arneda McDonald (August 10, 1953–April 11, 2007) was a lesbian African-American novelist, journalist, and lawyer. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and lived in Paris, France. A member of MENSA, McDonald earned a Bachelor degree in French Literature from Vassar, a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University, and a law degree from New York University. McDonald practiced law in New York, Seattle and Paris. An avid writer throughout her life, she published her first book in 1999, the memoir Project Girl. McDonald's work was inspired by personal experiences growing up in the Brooklyn projects. She would continue to publish young adult novels until her death from colon cancer in 2007, including Spellbound (2001), Chill Wind (2002), Twists and Turns (2003), Brother Hood (2004), Harlem Hustle (2006), and Off-Color (2007). She received the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent for Chill Wind and American Library Association awards for Twists and Turns and Spellbound.
Primary Text Source: NYPL Schomburg
Additional Text Source: MacMillan
Archives
Janet McDonald Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Biographical Chronology in Janet McDonald: The Original Project Girl →
A Talk with Janet McDonald, Assembly of Literature for Adolescents Review (PDF, pp. 54-57) →
Interview About Her Career Trajectory, CareerGirls.org →
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931–August 5, 2019) was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, cultural critic, playwright, and professor. Among her best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Sula. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Morrison studied English at Howard University and a masters in American Literature from Cornell University. Morrison later went to work for Random House, where she edited works by Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, as well as luminaries like Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. Morrison was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. Throughout her career, she won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved. Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 and continued to produce great works, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for the award. After retiring from Princeton, she continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery that debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007. Morrison has earned a plethora of accolades and honorary degrees, also receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
Archives
Toni Morrison Papers, Princeton University →
Random House Editorial Files, Columbia University →
Digital Resources
N.
Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor (January 25, 1950–September 28, 2016) was born on January 25th, 1950 in New York City, the eldest of three daughters. Raised in New York City (the Bronx, Harlem, and Queens), Naylor graduated from high school in 1968 and received an English degree from CUNY-Brooklyn College in 1981, with a degree in English. While she was still a student at Brooklyn College, Naylor’s short story, “A Life on Beekman Place,” was accepted for publication in Essence magazine. Building on her first publishing success, Gloria Naylor finished writing her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, in 1981 and used her advance to travel to Cadiz and Tangier, where she began work on her second novel, Linden Hills. She started a Master’s Degree in African American Studies at Yale University in 1981 and continued to work on Linden Hills as a thesis project, under the supervision of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; she graduated in 1983. The Women of Brewster Place, which recounts the interconnected lives of Black women living in a New York City apartment building, was published in 1982. It received the National Book Award for best first novel in 1983.
Working from her brownstone in Brooklyn, Naylor published her second novel, Linden Hills, in 1985, and her third novel, Mama Day, in 1988. With three acclaimed novels in print, Naylor was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and appointed as a Senior Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 1988. Naylor published her fourth novel, Bailey’s Cafe, in 1992. Following the publication of Bailey’s Cafe, Gloria Naylor began work on what she originally planned to be her fifth book, a historical novel about the Sapphira Wade, the legendary ancestor of the main characters in Mama Day. During this period, Naylor did editorial work as well, as a contributing editor at the journal Callaloo and as editor of Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by African American Writers, 1967 to the Present (1996). Naylor published The Men of Brewster Place in 1998 followed by a “fictionalized memoir,” entitled 1996, in 2005 which describes the experiences of racist surveillance that drove her from St. Helena Island.
In addition to her novels, Gloria Naylor pursued theatrical, filmmaking, and television projects, as both a writer and producer. In 1989, Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place was adapted as a two-part television miniseries with Oprah Winfrey. Seeking to maintain more creative control over adaptations of her work, Naylor founded her own film production company, One Way Productions, in 1990. Gloria Naylor sold her Brooklyn brownstone and moved away from New York City in 2009. She died of heart failure near her home in Christiansted, St. Croix on September 28, 2016.
Adapted from Lehigh University
Archives
Gloria Naylor Archives, Sacred Heart University & Lehigh University →
Digital Resources
PBS American Masters Archival Footage →
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Gloria Naylor "Other Places" Digital Exhibit →
Added 1/24/23; Last updated 3/8/23
O.
Bernadine Oliver
Bernadine Oliver (1950-1993), writing under the pen name “Bernadine,” was a poet, essayist, and activist. A sampling of poems and essays were published in two volumes It Begins Softly (1980) and Seeds of Ourselves (1984) by Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE). Oliver was a founding member of the New York chapter of WREE. She was also published in an anthology, Leaving the Bough: 50 American Poets of the 80s (1982). Oliver studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1979 after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1974 at the age of 24.
Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Bernadine Oliver Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
P.
Pat Parker
Pat Parker (January 20, 1944–June 17, 1989) was a feminist lesbian poet born on January 20, 1944. Parker grew up in Houston, Texas, the fourth daughter of Marie Louise (Anderson) and Ernest Nathaniel Cooks. Moving to California at age 17, she studied at Los Angeles City College. In 1962 she married Ed Bullins, a playwright and member of the Black Panthers. In the Bay area, she studied at San Francisco State College. Bullins and Parker ended their relationship and she then married Robert F. Parker. In the late 1960s, Parker began to identify as a lesbian and divorced Robert Parker. She had committed relationships with Laura Brown and Martha Dunham. She had two children, Cassidy, with Laura Brown and Anastasia with Martha Dunham.
Parker held a number of jobs in Oakland, California, including proofreading, waiting tables, teaching creative writing, and office work. Parker gave her first public poetry reading in 1963. Her first book of poetry, Child of Myself, appeared in 1972 followed by Pit Stop in 1973. In 1976 Parker and lesbian poet Judy Grahn released a phonograph album, Where Would I Be Without You. In 1978 Parker became director of Oakland's Feminist Women's Health Center and in 1980 she founded the Black Women's Revolutionary Council, a group of revolutionary feminists intended to educate people about the effects of racism, classism, and sexism. Other works included Womanslaughter (1978), Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker, 1961-1978 (1978), and Jonestown and Other Madness (1985). Parker died on June 17, 1989, of breast cancer in Oakland, California.
Text Source: Harvard University
Archives
Pat Parker Papers, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Digital Resources
Julie Enszer Interview on Parker, Harvard University (Radcliffe)→
Parker Reads “Jonestown and Other Madness,” Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks (May 10, 1963–) was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, to Francis McMillian Parks and Donald Parks, a colonel in the United States Army. As the child of a military officer, Parks spent some of her youth in German schools while her father was stationed in Europe. She attended Mount Holyoke College and studied fiction writing with James Baldwin, who recommended that she focus on writing for the theater. Parks began studying such playwrights as Ntozake Shange and Adrienne Kennedy, and she won honors for her experimental work “The Sinner’s Place.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College with her B.A. degree in English and German literature in 1985, Parks moved to London, where she began her career as a playwright. In 1987, her script “Betting on the Dust Commander” was produced in New York, and two years later, her play “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” was awarded an Obie Award for the best Off-Broadway play of 1989. In 1990, she also published “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole World.” Parks’ script for “The America Play” was produced in 1994; it starred an Abraham Lincoln-obsessed character who works in a carnival dressed in whiteface.
In 2001, Parks’ play “Topdog/Underdog” was produced to critical acclaim. It followed the story of two brothers and their growing tension, and starred Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle (who would be replaced by Mos Def when the play hit Broadway). Parks was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for drama, the first African American woman to do so. The following year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded her a MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius grant.” During 2003, Parks published her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, an experimental retelling of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Parks also wrote screenplays for 1990’s Anemone Me and 1996’s Girl 6, directed by Spike Lee, as well as the radio plays “Pickling,” “Third Kingdom,” and “Locomotive.” In 2015, Parks was awarded the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts.
Parks’ project “365 Days/365 Plays” (where she wrote a play a day for an entire year) was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her other plays include: “The Book of Grace,” “Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical,” “In the Blood” (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), “Venus” (1996 OBIE Award), “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom” (1990 OBIE Award, Best New American Play), and “Fucking A.” Her adaptation of “The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess” won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. Her 2015 play, “Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)”—set during the Civil War—was awarded the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama as well as being a 2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
Primary Text Source: The History Makers
Additional Text Source: Suzanloriparks.com
Archives
Suzan-Lori Parks Papers, Harvard University (Houghton) →
Digital Resources
2006 New Yorker Profile by Hilton Als →
Ethel Payne
Ethel Payne (August 14, 1911–May 28, 1991) was a freelance journalist and the first African American woman to become an international news correspondent. She covered issues pertaining to the political advancement and the social inequality among Blacks in America. An early crusader for African American civil rights, she remained a constant and vigorous political spokesperson in the fight to end racial discrimination. In her thirst for knowledge, and in her desire to share valuable information with the public, Payne, who would later receive international recognition for her endeavors, was dubbed the "First Lady of the Black Press" by the Washington Press Corps, of which she later became president in 1970.
While covering U.S involvement in the Vietnam War, Payne focused on the plight of the Black soldier and how issues, such as racial segregation and discrimination, remained relevant to life back home. In documenting the conditions of these soldiers, her aim was to "fully concentrate on the Negro effort," and to "paint an adequate picture of why they were in Vietnam." Later however, as a writer for the Chicago Defender, she remarked on her experience in covering the war as a failed attempt at reporting the overall immorality of it.
The daughter of a Pullman porter and a stay at home mother of 6, Payne, who desired to become a civil rights leader but was denied entrance into law school on account of her race, discovered her niche in journalism after being jailed for witnessing and questioning the brutal acts performed by a police officer on an African American man. After threatening to report the brutality to the press, she refused her approval for release, remained in jail and advocated for the liberation of the other detainees.
Her break into journalism came when she began organizing recreation and entertainment for African American troops stationed in Japan. In her diary, Payne transcribed accounts of the failed efforts of the U.S military during the war, which had later been published in the Chicago Defender. Despite the discrimination she encountered from high ranking officials in the U.S government, Payne was offered and accepted a full-time position with the Defender in 1951.
Along with her work as a Vietnam War correspondent, Payne became involved in various endeavors to move her career in journalism. During her time as White House correspondent from 1962-1966, Payne led the fight to end the segregation of interstate travel, immigration quotas, and discrimination in federal housing . Ethel was also the first African American woman to host network news by becoming a political commentator for the CBS aired program "Spectrum" in 1972. Persistently involved in international politics, Payne in 1970 completed a 10-nation tour of Africa with Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and a 6-nation tour with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger six years later. She covered several Democratic National conventions, and witnessed President Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Over her lifetime, she has received dozens of awards and honorable mentions for her political involvement and activism for African Americans, and her legacy continues to live on today. In 2002 the United States Postal Service honored Ethel Payne by issuing her a 37-cent stamp, and each year aspiring journalists wishing to gain experience on international reporting in Africa are awarded the Ethel Payne Fellowship.
On May 28, 1991 Ethel Payne died of a heart attack in her home in Washington, D.C. She is survived by close relatives, as she forfeited marriage and children for the sake of her work. She was commemorated as one of the 100 most influential correspondents by the National Association of Black Journalists, and remained, until her death, a longtime advocate in the struggle to bring about change, and to correct the inequalities and racial injustices in the world. Payne was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Adapted from Smithsonian Institution
Archives
Ethel Payne Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL) →
Ethel Payne Papers, Howard University →
Ethel Payne Papers, Smithsonian (Anacostia Community Museum) →
Digital Resources
Oral History with Washington Press Club Foundation (1987) →
“Covering the South” C-SPAN Interview with Ethel Payne (1987)→
Date Added 5/19/2023
Ann Petry
Ann Petry (October 12, 1908–April 28, 1997) born Anna Houston Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut was an American writer who became the first U.S. Black woman author to sell over a million copies with her debut novel The Street in 1946. Upon graduating high school, she briefly attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, VA before completing study at the Connecticut College of Pharmacy. For the next few years, she worked as a pharmacist at the family drugstore while continuing to write short stories in her spare time. In 1938, Ann married George David Petry and moved to New York City to pursue her literary ambitions of becoming a writer. Upon her arrival in Harlem, she soon found work selling advertising space for the Amsterdam News and became a reporter for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s weekly newspaper People's Voice. She taught for the NAACP and at PS 101. Petry was also involved in the arts as an actress. Her debut performance was at the American Negro Theater in a comedy called, On Striver's Row. She was co-founder of Negro Women Incorporated, a women's advocacy group affiliated with the People's Committee, founded by Powell. Petry wrote under the male pseudonym Arnold Petri prior to publishing her debut novel in 1946. Petry's subsequent publications include her second novel, Country Place (1947), Drugstore Cat (1949), The Narrows (1953), Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad (1955), Tituba of Salem Village (1964), Legends of the Saints (1970), and a book of short stories titled Miss Muriel and Other Stories, published in 1971. From 1973-1975, Petry briefly moved to Hawaii to serve as a Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaii. When she returned to Old Saybrook, much of her time was divided between writing, parenting, and providing care and assistance to other ailing family members.
Text Source: New York Public Library.
Archives
Ann Petry Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Ann Petry Collection, Boston University →
Papers of Ann Petry, 1938-2013, Harvard University (Schlesinger)→
Digital Resources
Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota →
Ann Petry’s The Street and The Narrows, The Yale Review →
Updated 10/17/2024
Carlene Hatcher Polite
Carlene Hatcher Polite (August 28, 1932–December 7, 2009) born in Detroit in 1932, was one of the most important artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A novelist, essayist, dancer, civil rights activist and educator, Polite was the author of two influential and much-praised novels, The Flagellants (1966) and Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975). Her experimentation with literary form and her attention to the rhythms and dialects of African American oral expression strongly influenced the development of postmodern Black fiction. Polite attended the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and from 1955 to 1963, pursued a career as a professional dancer, performing with New York City's Concert Dance Theater (1955-1959) and the Detroit Equity Theatre and Vanguard Playhouse (1960-1962). She taught modern dance and the Martha Graham technique at the Detroit YWCA (1960-1962) and YMCA (1962-1963) and as a visiting instructor at Wayne State University.
In the early 1960s Polite joined many African American artists and intellectuals in turning to political organizing and civil rights activism and in 1962 she was elected to the Michigan State Central Committee of the Democratic Party. She coordinated the Detroit Council for Human Rights and participated in the historic June 1963 Walk for Freedom and the November 1963 Freedom Now Rally to protest the Birmingham church bombings. In 1963 Polite organized the Northern Negro Leadership Conference, and was also active in the NAACP. In 1964 Polite moved to Paris, where in 1966 The Flagellants was published in French and translated to English the following year. A lyrical and much-praised protest of the limited gender roles available to African American women and men, it was one of the first works of African American fiction to move beyond the conventions of realism. Polite received a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship in 1967 and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1968 and joined the faculty of the University of Buffalo Department of English in 1971, where she taught creative writing and African American literature for 29 years.
Text Source: University of Buffalo
Archives
The Carlene Polite Collection, Boston University →
Digital Resources
S.
Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez (September 9, 1934–) is a poet, activist, playwright, editor, and teacher. From 1969 to the 1994, she authored eight books of poems including Homecoming (1969), We A BaddDDD People (1970), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974), homegirls & handgrenades (1984), and Under a Soprano Sky (1987). A recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the 1985 American Book Award, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women International League for Peace and Freedom in 1989, and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for her outstanding literary achievement. Sanchez has lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, China, Europe, Canada, and the Caribbean. She held the Laura Carnal Chair in English and was a Presidential Fellow at Temple University for many years until her retirement in 1999. Since the 1994 Furious Flower conference, Sanchez has continued to publish works, such as Wounded in the House of a Friend (1997), Does Your House Have Lions? (1998), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems (1999), and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (2000). Sanchez has staged numerous plays, including “The Bronx Is Next” (1970), “Dirty Hearts” (1971), “Sister Son/ji” (1972), “Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No Mo” (1979) “Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us?” (1975), “I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t” (1982) and “2 x 2” (2009). She was also awarded the Robert Frost Medal in 2001 and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2018.
Additional Text Source: Soniasanchez.net
Archives
Sonia Sanchez Collection, Boston University →
Digital Resources
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange (October 18, 1948 - October 27, 2018), born Paulette Williams on October 18, 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey. She spent several, formative years of her childhood in St. Louis before her family returned to Trenton where she attended high school. In 1966, she entered Barnard College where she received a bachelor's degree in American Studies. Following Barnard, she attended University of Southern California where she earned her master's, also in American Studies. While living in Southern California, she took the names Ntozake, translated from Xhosa as "she who comes into her own things," and Shange meaning "she who walks like a lion." Among Shange's best known works is the 1975 piece, first published as a chapbook by Shameless Hussy Press, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, a mix of music, dance, drama, and poetry conceptualized by Shange as a choreopoem. It was produced as an Off-Broadway theatre production, but quickly moved to the Booth Theater on Broadway and was the recipient of numerous awards including the Obie Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 1977, for colored girls was re-published by MacMillan and, in 2010, it was adapted into the film For Colored Girls.
The cross- and inter-disciplinary body of Shange's work is prolific and includes, but is certainly not limited to, theater works: “A Photograph: Lovers in Motion” (1977), “Boogie Woogie Landscapes” (1979), “Spell #7” (1979), “Mother Courage and Her Children” (1980, winner of a 1981 Obie Award), “Bocas” (1982), “Whitewash” (1994, adapted for a television special starring Ruby Dee); works of poetry such as: Nappy Edges (1978), A Daughter's Geography (1983), From Okra to Greens (1984), Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (1987), The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African American Family (2004, with photography by Frank Stewart and Kamoinge, Inc.), People of Watts (1993, first published in VIBE Magazine); and numerous novels: Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Betsey Brown(1985), Liliane (1994), Some Sing, Some Cry (2010, with Shange's sister Ifa Bayeza). Additionally, Shange authored several children's books and wrote the forward to Robert Mapplethorpe's book of photography, The Black Book (1986).
Shange dedicated much of her life to educating, directing, and performing. She was a visiting artist, an artist in residence, a scholar in residence, and/or taught courses in Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Literature at institutions including: Douglass College, University of Houston, Brown, City College of New York, Yale University, Howard University, New York University, and Barnard College. She has danced with the Third World Collective, Raymond Sawyer's Afro-American Dance Company, and the West Coast Dance Works. As a dancer she worked extensively with the choreographer and dancer Dianne McIntyre, having once been a student in McIntyre's Harlem dance studio. The collaborative relationship between Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre resulted in a number of works including the choreopoem Why I Had to Dance written by Shange and choreographed and directed by McIntyre. Shange appeared in numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf;” she directed works for the New York Shakespeare Fesitival and the Houston Equinox Theatre; and she acted in several plays including “Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon” (1977) and “Mouths” (1981).
Text Source: Barnard College Archives
Archives
Ntozake Shange Papers, Columbia University (Barnard) →
Digital Resources
Digital Shange Project, Barnard Center for Research on Women →
Christina Sharpe
Christina E. Sharpe (Unknown DOB) is a professor and non-fiction writer. Sharpe completed her Bachelors degree from the University of Pennsylvania in English and Africana studies during which time she spent a semester in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan. Afterwards, Sharpe went on to get both her Masters degree as well as a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Clearly expressing an interest in American literature, African American writing, and Black feminist theory, expressed in her graduate dissertation on Bessie Head, Sharpe acquired an associate professorship at Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges from 1996 to 1998 at which point she moved to Tufts University in Medford. There, Sharpe taught courses such as "Race and the Senses," "Queer Diasporas," and "Black Feminist Theories" in the English department. In 2005, Sharpe was awarded tenure and became a full professor in 2017. In 2018, Sharpe moved to York University in Toronto, where she is currently teaching in the English Department.
Alongside teaching, Sharpe has also published three major books, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023). Ordinary Notes was a National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Additionally, Sharpe has published numerous articles, book chapters, and essays including "Response to Jared Sexton's "Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts" (2002) which appeared in Lateral, "Learning to Live Without Black Familia: Cherríe Moraga's Nationalist Articulations" (2003), and "The Costs of Re-membering: What's at Stake in Gayl Jones's Corregidora" (2000). Sharpe has lectured and participated in conferences around the world, and is recognized today as a leading academic in Black Feminist Theory, English literature, and Africana studies.
Text Source: Brown University, with minor adjustments
Archives
Christina Sharpe Papers, Brown University
Digital Resources
New York Times Profile by J. Wortham (2023)→
Christina Sharpe and Torkwase Dyson in Conversation, Graham Foundation (2018)→
Added 12/6/23; Last updated 12/6/23
Eulalie Spence
Eulalie Spence (June 11, 1894–March 7, 1981) was a writer, playwright, and teacher born in Nevis, West Indies. She and her family moved to New York in 1902. Spence was among the pioneer playwrights during the Harlem Renaissance and wrote fourteen plays, five of which were published. She wrote only one three act play, “The Whipping” (1934), which was optioned by Paramount Studios, but never made into a film. Several of Spence's plays won awards. Spence earned a Bachelor degree from New York University and as Masters degree in speech and elocution in 1939 from Columbia University and is believed to be the only playwright of the Harlem Renaissance to formally attend classes in dramatic structure. With fourteen known plays, she was quite prolific during the 1920s-1930s and her talent was recognized by virtue of the many awards she received. Harlem was the setting for many of her plays including “Her” (a suspense drama that dealt with domestic violence) (1927), “Hot Stuff” (1927) and “Episode” (1928). Additional works include “The Started” (1923), “On Being Forty” (1924), “Foreign Mail” (1926), “Fool’s Errand” (1927), “The Hunch” (1927), “Undertow” (1927), and “La Divina Pastora” (1929).
Although her plays made a name for the Krigwa Players - a guild founded by W.E.B DuBois - she and DuBois often disagreed artistically. As a follower of Alain Locke, she held fast to her belief that her actors have the voice of the everyday working people; Black dialect included. Although often touted as one of the great rising playwrights during that time, she received little compensation. It has been reported that the $5,000 she received from Paramount Pictures for the three-act screenplay “The Whipping” was the only compensation she ever received. After the disbandment of the Krigwa Players, Spence focused on teaching and acting for Columbia University's Laboratory Players. Spence never married and used her progressive thinking to discuss social norms with her students. Spence taught for 31 years at the predominantly white Eastern District High School in Brooklyn.
Primary Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Additional Text Source: Columbia University
Archives
Eulalie Spence Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Profile, Columbia University Teachers College →
Photo Credit: Alex Woodward
Hortense Spillers
Hortense Spillers (April 24, 1942—) was born on April 24, 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee, where she grew up with two brothers and one sister. She attended Melrose High School before going on to earn her Bachelor of Arts and Master's degrees from the University of Memphis in 1964 and 1966 respectively. While at the University of Memphis, she served as a disc jockey for the all-Black radio station WDIA. Spillers then attended Brandeis University where, in 1969, she participated in the takeover of Ford Hall. Students who were dissatisfied with the racial climate on campus held an 11-day takeover that ultimately led to the establishment of the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis. After earning her Ph.D. in 1974, she went on to hold positions at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Cornell University, Emory University, and Vanderbilt University.
Spillers' research addresses psychoanalysis and race; the African diaspora; African-American literature and criticism; the representation of race in literature; linguistics; Black culture; and sexuality. She is best known for her 1987 article, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," one of the most cited essays in African-American literary studies today.
She is a member of the Modern Language Association and the Society for the Study of Narrative. Spillers has received numerous awards during her career, including most recently the Caribbean Philosophical Association's Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the Brandeis University Alumni Achievement Award in 2019. Brandeis' Provost, Lisa Lynch described Spillers as a "pioneering professor, feminist scholar and critic whose contributions have influenced the landscape of African American literary studies and advanced Black feminist theory."
Spillers published volumes include Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003), Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991), and Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition with Marjorie Pryse (1985).
Text Source: Brown University, with minor adjustments
Archives
Hortense J. Spillers Papers, Brown University
Digital Resources
Interview with Brandies Now (2019)→
The Idea of Black Culture Lecture, University of Waterloo (2013)→
Added 11/19/2024
T.
Merze V. Tate
Merze Vernie Tate (February 6, 1905–June 27, 1996), a specialist in international and diplomatic history, and in armaments and their limitations, was a non-fiction writer and professor of history at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. She was born in Blanchard, Michigan, the second of three children of Myrtle K. Lett and Charles E. Tate. She received a teacher's diploma from Western Michigan Teachers College in 1924 and taught for one year in a Cass County elementary School. In 1927, she was the first Black person to earn a bachelor's degree from Western Michigan College, completing a four-year program in three years.
Since Michigan did not employ "colored" teachers in its secondary schools, the dean, registrar, and president of the college loaned her money to seek employment elsewhere. She taught at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, 1927-32, and studied summers at Teachers' College, Columbia University, receiving a master's degree in 1930. She entered Oxford University on an Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Foreign Fellowship and in 1935 was the first Black person to earn a bachelor of literature degree. She also studied at Berlin University and the Geneva School of International Studies. Her full-length books include The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven, 1965), The United States and Armaments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (New York:MacMillan and Co., 1942), and Hawaii: Reciprocity Or Annexation (Michigan State University Press, 1968).
Tate was dean of women and taught history at Barber-Scotia College in North Carolina, 1935-36, then accepted a position at Bennett College, where she taught history and political science for five years. In 1941, she received a PhD at Radcliffe College (Harvard University). Tate was dean of women and taught political science at Morgan State University, 1941-42, when she was asked to come to Howard University as a professor of history. She spent the 1950-51 academic year in India as a Fulbright lecturer.
In addition to her roles in higher education and international affairs, Tate was a filmmaker for several organizations, and in 1962 produced a film for the State Department. She has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, awards, and citations, including the Rosenwald Fellowship, the National Urban League Achievement Award in 1948, the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association Graduate Chapter Medal for Distinguished Professional Service in 1953, the Radcliffe College Alumnae Achievement Award in 1979, and in 1981 the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
Adapted from Black Women Oral History Project, Radcliffe Institute
Archives
Merze Vernie Tate Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University) →
The Vernie Merze Tate Collection, 1865-1965 (Western Michigan University) →
Digital Resources
Interview with Black Women Oral History Project →
Merze Tate Profile (St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford)→
The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (Book) →
The United States and Armaments (Book) →
Washington Post Obituary - July 1996 →
Added 11/30/23; Last updated 11/30/23
W.
Alice Walker
Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-) is a poet, novelist, essayist, and activist. The youngest of eight children, Walker was born on February 9, 1944, to sharecroppers Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker in Eatonton, Georgia. Walker graduated valedictorian of her high school class in 1961. She attended Spelman College for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965.
Walker married lawyer Mel Leventhal in 1967 and moved to Jackson, Mississippi. She worked for Friends of the Children of Mississippi, an early Head Start program. She also served as the writer-in-residence for Jackson State College and Tougaloo College. In 1968, Walker published her first book of poetry, Once. Shortly thereafter in 1969, she published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the same year her daughter Rebecca was born. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman, both appeared in 1973. After moving to New York, Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s. In 1977, Walker divorced Leventhal and moved to California.
Walker has written numerous essays, novels, and collections of poetry. Her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Walker has also served as a contributing editor of Ms. during the 1980s and founded the Wild Trees Press in 1984. Walker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005). She also released the volume of short stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry, including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects poetry from 1965 to 1990.
Walker’s essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on such female writers as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston. In 2011, Walker published a memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, discussing her care for a flock of chickens. The documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013.
Primary Text Source: Brittanica
Additional Text Source: Emory University
Archives
Alice Walker Papers, Emory University →
Digital Resources
Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker Alexander (July 7, 1915–November 30, 1998) born Margaret Abigail Walker was an American novelist, biographer, essayist, and poet most known for her novel Jubilee. She finished elementary school by the age of eleven and graduated from high school by fourteen to attend the University of New Orleans. She received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University before attending the University of Iowa for graduate school, receiving a master’s in 1940 and a doctorate in 1965. She and her husband, Firnist James Alexander, had four children. Alexander’s most critically acclaimed work is her only novel, Jubilee (1966). Jubilee won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and breathed new life into her career, igniting new academic interest in her poetry. Alexander’s other literary endeavors include Prophets for a New Day (1970), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974). She also published two collections of essays, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays of Life and Literature (1990) and On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932–1992 (1997). In Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), Alexander offers a biography of her famous friend and literary contemporary. Alexander also dedicated herself to education, serving as a professor of English at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1979.
Text Source: Mississippi Encyclopedia
Archives
Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University →
Correspondence with Richard Wright, Yale University (Beinecke) →
Digital Resources
Margaret Walker Digital Archive, Jackson State University →
Black Women Oral History Project, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Archival Connections, Yale University (Beinecke) →
Michele Wallace
Michelle Wallace (January 4, 1952–) is a writer, feminist scholar, and cultural critic best known for her first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979). Wallace was born and raised in Harlem and began her writing career while she was a student at City College of New York. Wallace, went on to earn a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University. Throughout the 1970s, her articles, essays, interviews and editorials appeared in newspapers and journals such as The Village Voice, Newsweek, and Ms. Magazine, and later The New York Times and Transitions. Black Macho, Wallace's polemic was an instant bestseller. It is considered the first collection of essays published by a black woman, and the first book published by a black feminist. Wallace’s second book, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (1991) helped to establish Wallace as a formidable cultural critic. In her third collection, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2004) Wallace continues to mine her theoretical preoccupations on autobiography, black feminism, postmodernism, and pop culture. Wallace is the daughter of the visual and performance artist Faith Ringgold and has written extensively on Ringgold’s work.
Primary Text Source: New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Additional Text Source: Michelefwallace.com
Archives
Michele Wallace Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
2010 KPFA Radio Interview (Audio, Begins at 23:00) →
New Introduction to Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman →
Mary Helen Washington
Mary Helen Washington (January 21, 1941—) is a scholar, researcher, writer, former American Studies Association President, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Washington's work explores topics such as Black women writers, Black literature, and radicalism. Her publications include The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by Black Women Writers, and Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, among others.
Adapted from New York Public Library (Schomburg)
Archives
Mary Helen Washington, New York Public Library (Schomburg) →
Digital Resources
Manuscript for Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow, Howard University (Moorland-Spingarn)→
Mary Helen Washington Wikipedia →
Created: 12/1/2023; Last Updated: 12/1/2023
Dorothy West
Dorothy West (June 2, 1907–August 16, 1998) was born in Boston in 1907 and moved to New York City in 1925 at the age of eighteen. She was the youngest among a group of artists and writers working in the period that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes nicknamed her “the kid.” She published her first story at the age of fourteen, in the Boston Post. In 1926 she and Zora Neale Hurston tied for second place in a contest sponsored by the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine. The next year West had a bit part in the play, “Porgy,” and toured with it for a couple of years. In 1932 she traveled to Russia with twenty other African Americans to make a film on American racism. The film was never made, but she stayed in Russia for a year. During the Depression, West worked for the Federal Writers Project. From the fall of 1940 until the 1960s, she earned money writing two short stories a month for the New York Daily News. In the mid-1940s she moved to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard and regularly wrote a column for the Vineyard Gazette. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, was published in 1948. Her second novel, The Wedding, was not published until 1995. West died in 1998.
From Text Source: Harvard University (Radcliffe)
Archives
Dorothy West Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Dorothy West Collection, Boston University →
Digital Resources
Dorothy West Digital Collection, Harvard University (Radcliffe) →
Photo Source: Temple University via Flowers Family Project
Geraldine Wilson
Geraldine Louise Wilson (December 18, 1931-August 5, 1986) was an early childhood specialist, poet, writer and civil rights activist. Born in Philadelphia, Wilson was the daughter of Herbert and Hilda Wilson. She received a bachelor of science, specializing in Early Childhood and Elementary Education from Temple University in 1955 and a master's from New York University's School of Education in 1968. While at Temple, Wilson was initiated into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Wilson studied for six weeks at the University of Ghana for a certificate in African history.
After graduation, Wilson taught in the South Philadelphia public school systems. In 1964, she left Philadelphia to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) located in the Mississippi Delta and Georgia and was a co-planner of the Mississippi Institute for Early Childhood Education.
In 1966, she relocated to New York City to work as an instructor and consultant in early childhood education at New York University and several other local colleges. From 1973 to 1979, she was the project director of the New York City Head Start Regional Training Office located at New York University. During her tenure as project director, Wilson would continue consultant work with other Head Start programs outside of New York City.
The Head Start Program is a government program that provides early childhood education, nutrition and other essential needs for low-income children. In this position, she headed the Oral Tradition Project that wrote the manual "'Tell It!' a Manual on Storytelling and Oral Tradition in Early Childhood Settings" (1978). Upon leaving Head Start, Wilson became a full-time consultant for educational institutions. In 1981, Wilson co-founded New Bone, a poetry magazine, with Margaret Porter and Regina Williams. The magazine would present creative work of well-known poets and combine the poetry with African-American music and other art forms. Wilson died in New York City in 1986.
Text Sources: New York Public Library (Schomburg) and Flowers Family Project.
Archives
Geraldine Wilson Papers, New York Public Library (Schomburg)→
Digital Resources
Flowers Family Project, Messiah College →
Dr. Christina J. Thomas’s Research Notes on Geraldine Wilson→
Created: 12/2/2023; Last Updated: 12/2/2023