Black LGBTQ+ Writers
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Biography:
Awaeke Emezi is a Nigerian video artist and writer. She is of Igbo and Tamil heritage. Emezi earned a master's degree from New York University and has written articles that have appeared in publications and on websites, including the Cut, Vogue.com , Buzzfeed, Commonwealth Writers, and Granta online, In 2018, she released her first novel, Freshwater.
Excerpt above from: "Emezi, Akwaeke 1987–." (2019). Contemporary Authors, edited by Catherine C. DiMercurio, vol. 419, Gale, pp. 103-104. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2490800057/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=e808a66d.
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Freshwater by Call Number: PR9387.9.E42 F74 2018ISBN: 9780802127358Publication Date: 2018-02-13The astonishing debut novel from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, and Pet, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, an unusual child who is a source of deep concern to her southern Nigerian family. Young Ada is troubled, prone to violent fits. Born "with one foot on the other side," she begins to develop separate selves within her as she grows into adulthood. And when she travels to America for college, a traumatic event on campus crystallizes the selves into something powerful and potentially dangerous, making Ada fade into the background of her own mind as these alters--now protective, now hedonistic--move into control. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author's realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace.
Pet by Call Number: Butler Children's Literature CenterISBN: 9780525647072Publication Date: 2019-09-10A singular book that explores themes of identity and justice. Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother's paintings and a drop of Jam's blood, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption's house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question--How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? A riveting and timely young adult debut novel that asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.
The Death of Vivek Oji by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9780525541608Publication Date: 2020-08-04What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew? One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens--and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis--the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom. Propulsively readable, teeming with unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations--a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.
Biography:
Author, poet, journalist, teacher, civil rights activist
Bright, bold, and beautiful, Alice Dunbar-Nelson had a racially ambiguous appearance and well-heeled rearing that allowed her to move easily between various social classes, ethnicities, and races in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America. Her experiences allowed her a unique perspective on society that she captured with uncanny precision, feeling, insight, and imagination in her writing. At the core of each of her works is a narrator. Whether it is herself, someone she knew, or someone she invented, her narrators lure readers into the lives of Americans whom they otherwise would not have had the inclination or opportunity to know during their real-life experience. To follow Dunbar-Nelson’s prose is to embark on a virtual journey into the little-known neighborhoods and homes of her era, witnessing upclose the timeless struggles, failings, sorrows, hopes, and valor of ordinary people—black, white, Creole, Cajun, the newly immigrated, or ethnically unspecified.
Excerpt above from: Walsh, Melissa. (2004). "Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 1875–1935." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Ralph G. Zerbonia, et al., vol. 44, Gale, pp. 56-59. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3431000024/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=4e520c89.
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The Goodness of St. Rocque and other stories by ISBN: 9780593244074Publication Date: 2022-02-08This vivid collection transports readers to New Orleans, from the delights of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, to the quiet Bayou where lovers meet, and to fish fries on the shore of the Mississippi Sound. Alice Dunbar-Nelson focuses the struggles and joys of the Creole community in these intimate stories featuring unforgettable characters. In the title story, Manuela goes to the Wizened One for a charm when her lover strays; in "Little Miss Sophie," a young woman goes to extreme lengths to get back a ring she pawned; in "M'sieu Fortier's Violin," a talented musician finds himself at a loss when his greatest passion is taken away; and in "The Fisherman of Pass Christian," Annette, an aspiring opera singer, falls in love with a beautiful fisherman who has a secret. Together these stories provide a unique window into the world of everyday Creole Louisianians.
Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-NelsonCall Number: PS3507.U6228 Z465 1984ISBN: 9780393018936Publication Date: 1985-02-01The diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 1921-1931.
First World War PlaysISBN: 9781472523846Publication Date: 2014-06-19First World War Plays draws together canonical and lesser-known plays from the First World War to the end of the twentieth century, tracing the ways in which dramatists have engaged with and resisted World War I in their works. Spanning almost a century of conflict, this anthology explores the changing cultural attitudes to warfare, including the significance of the war over time, interwar pacifism, and historical revisionism. The collection includes writing by combatants, as well as playwrights addressing historical events and national memory, by both men and women, and by writers from Great Britain and the United States. Includes "Mine Eyes Have Seen" by Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Biography:
One of the most prolific black writers in America and among the most important contemporary American writers, Walker is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, whose publication in 1982 made her an overnight literary celebrity. In novels, poetry, short stories, and essays, Walker writes about the black woman's struggle for spiritual wholeness and for sexual, political, and racial equality. Her work is an exploration of the individual identity of the black woman and how embracing her identity and bonding with other women affects the health of her community at large.
Excerpt above from: "Walker, Alice 1944–." (2008). Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors since 1950, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Gale, pp. 366-383. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3079400096/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=293f21c5.
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The Color Purple by Call Number: PS3573.A425 C61982ISBN: 9780544805026Publication Date: 2015-11-10This is the story of two sisters--one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South--who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.
The Temple of My Familiar by Call Number: PS3573.A425 T461989ISBN: 9780151885336Publication Date: 1989-05-01Returning frequently to Suwelo's visits to Mr. Hal and his stories about Fanny, this tale transcends time and examines such contradictions as black vs. white, man vs. woman, sexual freedom vs. sexual slavery, past vs. present, etc.
Living by the Word by Call Number: PS3573.A425 A61988ISBN: 9780151529001Publication Date: 1988-05-01A collection of essays, talks, and journal entries mostly about her life and writing by the author of The Color Purple.
Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Call Number: PS3573.A425 B45 1997ISBN: 9780679455844Publication Date: 1997-04-01America's beloved author of The Color Purple writes here about her life as an activist, in a book rich in belief in the world as savable, if only we will act on our beliefs. Here are a superb writer's thoughts on politics, culture, feminism, race, religion, raising a daughter, writing and living.
Angelina Weld Grimké
Image source: from the book Negro poets and their poems digitzed by NYPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Biography:
A prominent poet and playwright before and during the Harlem Renaissance, Angelina Weld Grimké faded into near obscurity soon thereafter, seemingly because of a struggle between her bisexuality, on the one hand, and black middle-class expectations and her father's dominating will, on the other. The extent to which she felt sexually thwarted is evident in her poetry, especially in the poems that she never tried to have published, and in a diary she kept when she was in her twenties. Filled with images of longing, heartbreak, and death, these works offer a glimpse into the sense of despair and hopelessness that affected Grimké throughout much of her life and ultimately led her to give up writing altogether. Due to her limited literary output, Grimké has garnered less recognition than other Harlem Renaissance writers, but since the middle 1980s, she has received much needed critical attention, as scholars have recognized themes of same-sex desire in her work (although often ignoring her expressions of attraction to men).
Excerpt above from: Beemyn, Brett. (2004). "Grimké, Angelina Weld." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 1, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 470-471. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600212/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=1d888b2e.
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Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké by Call Number: PS508.N3 S3V.5ISBN: 0195061993Publication Date: 1991-04-18Centered around the themes of death, women as objects of desire, lost love, motherhood, and children, the poems in this selection offer insight into the work of this well-known abolitionist and advocate of women's rights. Including Grimke's prose and drama, which often focus on lynching, thisvolume sheds new light on a perspective characterized by the African-American experience of racial pride and the reaction against racists acts.
Rachel by ISBN: 1783196866Publication Date: 2014-09-30The first play by an African American woman ever produced professionally and one of the first plays to protest lynching and racial violence.
The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by WomenCall Number: PS647.A35 S581993ISBN: 9780813519449Publication Date: 1993-04-01In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West. Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
American Poetry: The Twentieth CenturyCall Number: PS613 .A4 2000ISBN: 9781883011772Publication Date: 2000-03-20In the years between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, American poetry was transformed, producing a body of work whose influence was felt throughout the world. Now for the first time the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry through the post-War years restores that era in all its astonishing beauty and explosive energy. This first volume of the set, organized chronologically by the poets' birthdates, takes the reader from Henry Adams (1838-1918) to Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), and in the process reveals the unfolding of a true poetic renaissance.
Biography:
The poet, novelist, and teacher Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in Harlem to West Indian parents. She described herself as "a black lesbian feminist mother lover poet." The exploration of pain, rage, and love in personal and political realms pervades her writing. Perhaps because Lorde did not speak until she was nearly five years old and also suffered from impaired vision, her passions were equally divided between a love of words and imagery and a devotion to speaking the truth, no matter how painful. Her objective, she stated, was to empower and encourage toward speech and action those in society who are often silenced and disfranchised.
Excerpt above from: King, N. R. (2006). "Lorde, Audre." Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, edited by Colin A. Palmer, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, pp. 1339-1340. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3444700775/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=01b3cbf5.
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Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by ISBN: 0895941236Publication Date: 1983-09-01Zami: A New Spelling of My Name began a new genre that the author calls biomythography, which combines history, biography, and myth. In the text, Lorde writes that "Zami" is "a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers," noting that Carriacou is the Caribbean island from which her mother immigrated. The name proves fitting: Lorde begins Zami writing that she owes her power and strength to the women in her life, and much of the book is devoted to detailed portraits of other women.
The Cancer Journals by ISBN: 1879960265Publication Date: 1980-10-01Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer and a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Lorde fuses the personal and political, and refuses the silencing and invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death and as a woman coping with the loss of her breast.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 0307809048Publication Date: 2007Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
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Biography:
Writing on and organizing around issues of liberation for blacks, women, lesbians, and gay men, Barbara Smith is at the forefront of contemporary movements in connecting various forms of discrimination and liberation struggles. She demonstrates the importance of the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class in LGBT history.
Excerpt above from: Springer, Kimberly. (2004). "Smith, Barbara." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 3, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 127-128. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600478/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=351078c4.
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The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom by Call Number: E185.86 .S635 1998ISBN: 9780813525730Publication Date: 1998-10-01The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom brings together more than two decades of literary criticism and political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power, and social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining black women's literary traditions and in making connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender. Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women's literature. Pieces about racism in the women's movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries on the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. It also includes a never-before-published personal essay on racial violence and the bonds between black women that make it possible to survive.
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology by Call Number: E185.96 .H7 1983ISBN: 9780913175026Publication Date: 1983-09-01Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology is a collection of Black lesbian and Black feminist essays, edited by Barbara Smith. The anthology includes different accounts from 32 black women of feminist ideology who come from a variety of different areas, cultures, and classes. This collection of writings is intended to showcase the similarities among black women from different walks of life. (Wikipedia)
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies by Call Number: E185.86 .A4 1982ISBN: 9780912670928Publication Date: 1982-01-01Winner of the Outstanding Women of Colour Award, and the Women Educator's Curriculum Material Award, this ground-breaking collection provides a wealth of materials needed to develop course units on black women, from political theory to literary essays on major writers to work on black women's contributions to the blues. Bibliographies and a collection of syllabi provide readers with essential classroom materials and a map for further research. For course use in: African American studies, feminist thought, lesbian studies, racism and sexism, women's studies.
Bayard Rustin
Image source: New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Wolfson, Stanley, photographer., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Biography:
Bayard Rustin never stood directly in the media spotlight that shone upon other black activists, but his contributions as a strategist and tactician place him among the most influential of twentieth-century civil rights leaders. In a career spanning more than five decades, Rustin worked on behalf of equal rights with a variety of organizations—including the Communist party, labor unions, and pacifist groups—and exercised a leading role in the creation of two significant civil rights organizations: the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was particularly instrumental in the development of the nonviolent protest movement that evolved from the Montgomery bus boycott associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. Although it was King who was catapulted into a position of national leadership by the boycott, it was Rustin, a man twenty years King’s senior, who provided much of the organizational know-how, political savvy, and theoretical underpinning for King’s civil rights victories.
Excerpt above from: Martin, Jonathan. (1993). "Rustin, Bayard 1910–1987." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Barbara Carlisle Bigelow, vol. 4, Gale, pp. 210-214. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2870600060/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=20cbb7de.
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- Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin by Call Number: E185.61 .R9651971ISBN: 9780812901856Publication Date: 1971-01-01The collected writings of Bayard Rustin, civil rights and gay rights activist.
I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in LettersISBN: 9780872865785Publication Date: 2012-03-20A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence. Despite these achievements, Rustin often remained in the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Here we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his eloquent, impassioned letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day--including Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard RustinISBN: 9781627781268Publication Date: 2015-03-24In 1956 Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King Jr. strategies of nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thereby launching the civil rights movement. Widely acclaimed as a founding father of modern black protest, Rustin reached international notoriety in 1963 as the openly gay organizer of the March on Washington. Long before the March on Washington, Rustin's leadership placed him at the vanguard of social protest. His gay identity, however, became a point of contention with the movement, with the controversy embroiling even King himself. Time on Two Crosses offers an insider's view of many of the defining political moments of our time. From Gandhi's impact on African Americans, white supremacists in Congress, and the assassination of Malcolm X to Rustin's never-before-published essays on Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, and the call for gay rights, Time on Two Crosses chronicles five decades of Rustin's commitment to justice and equality.
Biography:
Writer, professor, and social critic bell hooks is one of the most successful “cross-over” academics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her name, as well as the criticisms of racism and sexism that she has penned, have been central to many academic discussions, and they are also read widely outside of the educational arena. She has written more than 30 books, mainly focused on the functions of race, class, and gender in contemporary culture, and taking as their subjects movies, television, advertising, political events, socioeconomic conditions—anything that reflects social inequality. In the introduction to 1992's Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks explained the fundamental political purpose of her cultural criticism: “It struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identify.”
Excerpt above from: Blanc, Ondine E. Le, and Margaret L. Moser. (2011). "Hooks, Bell 1952–." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Margaret Mazurkiewicz, vol. 90, Gale, pp. 78-83. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX1909000035/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=6f17c064.
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Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by Call Number: E185.86 .H73 1992ISBN: 0896081303Publication Date: 1999-07-01Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is a 1981 book by bell hooks titled after Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech. hooks examines the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. She argues that the convergence of sexism and racism during slavery contributed to Black women having the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. White female abolitionists and suffragists were often more comfortable with Black male abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, while southern segregationalists and stereotypes of Black female promiscuity and immorality caused protests whenever Black women spoke. hooks points out that these white female reformers were more concerned with white morality than the conditions these morals caused Black Americans. (Wikipedia)
Teaching to Transgress by ISBN: 9780415908078Publication Date: 1994-09-14These essays, by one of America's leading black intellectuals, face squarely the problems of teachers who do not want to teach, of students who do not want to learn, of racism and sexism in the classroom, and of the gift of freedom that is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.
Feminist Theory From Margin to Center by Call Number: HQ1426 .H675 1984ISBN: 9780896082212Publication Date: 1984-10-01When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory "unsettling" or "provocative." Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement. (Amazon)
Biography:
George M Johnson is an Award-Winning Black Non-Binary Writer, Author, and Executive Producer located in the LA area. They are the author of the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Young Adult memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue discussing their adolescence growing up as a young Black Queer boy in New Jersey through a series of powerful essays. The book was optioned for Television by Gabrielle Union.
As a former journalist, George has written for major outlets including Teen Vogue, Entertainment Tonight, NBC, and Buzzfeed. In 2019 was awarded the Salute to Excellence Award by the National Association of Black Journalists for their article “When Racism Anchors your Health” in Vice Magazine.
George was listed on The Root 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. The Out 100 Most Influential LGBTQ People in 2021. And in 2022 was honored as one of the TIME100 Next Most Influential People in the World.
Their second memoir WE ARE NOT BROKEN was released in September of 2021. It received the Carter G. Woodson Award which recognizes books that “accurately and sensitively depict the experience of one or more historically marginalized racial/ethnic groups in the United States”. The book also received the Nonfiction Honor Book in the YA category from the International Literacy Association.
Excerpt above from: https://iamgmjohnson.com/gmj-media-kit-new/
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All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by Call Number: 921 J6301a 2020ISBN: 9780374312718Publication Date: 2020-04-28In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy.
Biography:
Bringing tough issues to vibrant, memorable characters through lyrical, poignant writing, Jacqueline Woodson helps young readers and adults discover the value of self-identity. The author of over thirty books, Woodson specializes in young adult fiction and poetry but has also published nonfiction, books for middle grade readers, picture books, and titles for adults. Her works have amassed major literary awards including the National Book Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, Newbery Honor Book designations, Coretta Scott King Awards, and more. Diversity and self-acceptance tie together the works of this prolific author through the eyes of characters who feel they are on the outside. Characters represent people not often represented in middle grade or young adult fiction, and through their words and stories she offers points of view that broaden readers' perspectives on important realities in their own worlds. Woodson smashes stereotypes in her work when tragedy, love, and family come together in evocative, emotional situations to show the resilience and intelligence of young people. In response to winning the Edwards Award in 2006, Woodson said, “I feel compelled to write against stereotypes; hoping people will see that some issues know no color, class, sexuality.”
Excerpt above from: Alessio, Amy. (2018). "Woodson, Jacqueline (1964—)." American Writers, Supplement 28, edited by Jay Parini, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 277-290. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3652400026/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=9f3670a1.
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Brown Girl Dreaming by Call Number: Juvenile Collection FIC. W868b 2014ISBN: 9781432850425Publication Date: 2018-02-21Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
Harbor Me by Call Number: Butler Children's Literature CenterISBN: 9780399252525Publication Date: 2018-08-28Harbor Me celebrates the healing that can occur when a group of students share their stories. It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat--by themselves, with no adults to listen in. There, in the room they soon dub the ARTT Room (short for "A Room to Talk"), they discover it's safe to talk about what's bothering them--everything from Esteban's father's deportation and Haley's father's incarceration to Amari's fears of racial profiling and Ashton's adjustment to his changing family fortunes. When the six are together, they can express the feelings and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world. And together, they can grow braver and more ready for the rest of their lives.
Before the Ever After by Call Number: Juvenile Collection FIC. W868b 2020ISBN: 9780399545436Publication Date: 2020-09-01National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson's stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies. For as long as ZJ can remember, his dad has been everyone's hero. As a charming, talented pro football star, he's as beloved to the neighborhood kids he plays with as he is to his millions of adoring sports fans. But lately life at ZJ's house is anything but charming. His dad is having trouble remembering things and seems to be angry all the time. ZJ's mom explains it's because of all the head injuries his dad sustained during his career. ZJ can understand that--but it doesn't make the sting any less real when his own father forgets his name. As ZJ contemplates his new reality, he has to figure out how to hold on tight to family traditions and recollections of the glory days, all the while wondering what their past amounts to if his father can't remember it. And most importantly, can those happy feelings ever be reclaimed when they are all so busy aching for the past?
Biography:
Baldwin was one of the most important, and one of the least understood, writers of his generation. Beginning with one of his earliest essays, "The Preservation of Innocence," which appeared in the magazine Zero in 1949, he elaborated over the course of his career as a writer an unusually complex understanding of identity, one that puzzled many readers, even those who admired him. In this essay, which examined the homophobia of American society, Baldwin protested what he believed was the one-dimensional representation of homosexuals in American fiction and asserted, somewhat controversially, that it was "quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one dimensional a fashion" (p. 22). For Baldwin, categories of identity such as race, class, and sexuality could not be understood apart from each other, but rather needed to be analyzed in relation to other crosscutting axes of subordination and difference. Thus, homosexuals were never just homosexuals. They also had a race, a class, and a gender, a combination of identities that writers of gay and lesbian fiction tended to overlook in their attempts to expose homosexual oppression. By contrast, Baldwin attempted to show how individuals disabled by one set of oppressions (homophobia and classism, for example) could be empowered by another (racism and sexism, for example). For this reason, his work challenged the organization of identity in the period following World War II, which depended on the binary oppositions white/black, male/female, and straight/gay.
Excerpt above from: Corber, R. J. (2004). "Baldwin, James." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 1, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 110-112. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600055/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=2d1a2ad4.
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The Fire Next Time by ISBN: 0804149720Publication Date: 1993At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.
James Baldwin: Early Novels and StoriesCall Number: PS3552.A45 A6 1998ISBN: 9781883011512Publication Date: 1998-02-01Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as "an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us." Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin's most ambitious novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful "Sonny's Blues," the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer- "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
James Baldwin: Collected EssaysCall Number: PS3552.A45 A6 1998bISBN: 9781883011529Publication Date: 1998-02-01James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro." Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
June Jordan
Image source: Jordan, J. (2021). Essential June Jordan. Penguin Books.
Biography:
By the mid-1990s Jordan had become one of the country’s most prominent contemporary black women writers. A nationally renowned lecturer and activist, she has produced an extensive and varied body of work. In it she strongly affirms herself, her rights as a woman, her thoughts on black consciousness, and her ties to the African American community. Though she is best known for her intimate, powerfully direct poetry, Jordan has also written award-winning children’s fiction, highly charged nonfiction pieces, plays, and songs.
Excerpt above from: Sussman, Alison Carb. (1994). "Jordan, June 1936–." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Barbara Carlisle Bigelow, vol. 7, Gale, pp. 149-153. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2870900043/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=53968287.
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Life As Activism: June Jordan's Writings From the Progressive by ISBN: 1936117908Publication Date: 2014-02-01This volume is a complete collection of June Jordan's columns for The Progressive, published between 1989 and 2001. Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet and UC Berkeley professor who is celebrated as a great human rights activist and social critic. Through her work, she taught a concept of "life as activism," based on inclusiveness, consistency, honesty, and identification with the oppressed. Far from being a purely idealistic and unsustainable approach to life, Jordan demonstrated that "life as activism" can be a way of engaging with the world that is accessible to all people who are committed to social justice.
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan by Call Number: E839.4 .J67 2002ISBN: 0465036929Publication Date: 2002-07-31Poet and activist June Jordan wrote her way to the forefront of political analysis, witness and moral summoning for more than half a century. These important new essays, along with work drawn from every phase of her prolific career, document her ongoing leadership and commitment in every conflicted sphere of our second millennium lives: the varieties of supremacist values and policies; the theft of democracy inside the United States; racial and gender inequality, and the arrogance that upholds all forms of justice. In Some of Us Did Not Die, June Jordan calls us to a faithful position of outspoken resistance and hope.
His Own Where by Call Number: Juvenile Collection FIC. J764h 1971ISBN: 1282746103Publication Date: 2010-01-01With their lives spinning out of control, sixteen-year-old Buddy Rivers and his girlfriend Angela create their own way of staying alive in Brooklyn in the mid-1960s.
Lorraine Hansberry
Image source: Hansberry L., & Nemiroff R. (1995). A Raisin in the Sun (Modern Library). Modern Library.
Biography:
With her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Hansberry became the first African American and the youngest woman to ever win the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A drama as much about class as race, the work traces the experiences of a black, blue-collar family whose members decide to move into a white neighborhood. The play's popularity proved that theatergoing audiences, Broadway producers, and critics alike were ready for dramas by and about African Americans to be a part of the New York theater scene. A Raisin in the Sun was, however, criticized by some militant blacks for what they viewed as assimilationist themes. Following the phenomenal success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry continued to work as a dramatist and also wrote a collection of essays, though A Raisin in the Sun overshadowed the rest of her work throughout her short life.
Excerpt above from: "Hansberry, Lorraine 1930-1965." (2008). Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors since 1950, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Gale, pp. 119-135. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3079400051/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=7d5e3527.
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A Raisin in the Sun [video] by Call Number: DVD PN1997 .R159 1999ISBN: 9780767828062Publication Date: 1999Film of the award-winning play about a struggling black family living on Chicago's South Side and the impact of an unexpected insurance bequest. Each family member sees the bequest as the means of realizing dreams and of escape from grinding frustrations.
Four Contemporary American PlaysCall Number: PS634 .C416ISBN: 9780394702032Publication Date: 1961-08-12A collection of four classic plays including "A Raisin In The Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry.
Conversations with Lorraine HansberryISBN: 9781496829634Publication Date: 2020-12-28Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of Hansberry's substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one interviews collected here -- ranging from just before the Broadway premier of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry's death -- offer an incredible window into Hansberry's aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to black writers of the mid-twentieth century -- including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, university and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between black intellectuals and the black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own WordsISBN: 9780451531780Publication Date: 2011-01-04To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a special kind of autobiography, in a very special voice. Both the story and the voice belong to a young woman from Chicago who moved to New York, won fame with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun--and went on to new heights of artistry before her tragically early death. In turns angry, loving, bitter, laughing, and defiantly proud, the story, voice, and message are all Lorraine Hansberry's own, coming together in one of the major works of the Black experience in mid-twentieth-century America.
Biography:
Chicago native M Shelly Conner spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A multi-genre writer, she is the creator of the Quare Life web series and has published essays on dapperqueer aesthetics, black womanhood, self-sustainable living and their intersections in various publications including: the A.V. Club; the Grio; Playboy Magazine; and Crisis Magazine. An excerpt of everyman appears in the Obsidian Journal of Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Conner is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives with her wife and their dog Whiskey on their Arkansas homestead.
Excerpt above from: http://mshellyconner.com/
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Everyman by ISBN: 9781094006208Publication Date: 2021-07-20Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve's twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve's search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home. Eve's questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the twentieth century, settles into the soil of the South, the blood and souls of Black folk making love and life and fleeing in a Great Migration into the savage embrace of the North.
Biography:
In the course of only a few years Nella Larsen produced two of the most accomplished novels of the Harlem Renaissance, and she was considered one of the period's most promising authors. Her work reflects her own experiences as a biracial person (she was the daughter of a white mother and a black father), focusing on the issues of identity and belonging that she and others of mixed racial heritage faced. Larsen is credited with moving away from casting the biracial individual as a "tragic mulatto," a common practice in nineteenth-century novels, and achieving more complex portrayals. Critics also praise her sensitive explorations of the problems of women (especially black women) in search of fulfillment.
Excerpt above from: "Larsen, Nella." (2001). Harlem Renaissance, edited by Christine Slovey and Kelly King Howes, vol. 1, UXL, pp. 227-232. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3425700026/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=a7fd476e.
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Passing by Call Number: PS3523.A7225 P37 2003ISBN: 0142437271Publication Date: 2003-02-04Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to "pass" as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare's risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare's interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene's black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.
Quicksand by Call Number: PS3523.A7225 Q55 2006ISBN: 0486451402Publication Date: 2006-09-15Brave, bold, and brilliant, this ground-breaking first novel is the work of one of the Harlem Renaissance's most influential and enduring writers. Larsen's autobiographical portrait of a biracial woman's quest for self-identity and acceptance offers a cautionary tale of an individual lost between two cultures.
The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by WomenCall Number: PS647.A35 S581993ISBN: 0813519446Publication Date: 1993-04-01In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West. Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
Biography:
As an activist, feminist, lawyer, and socialist, Pauli Murray was involved in some of the key social justice movements in the United States during the twentieth century. ... The broad spectrum of Murray's interests and activities tell only part of the story of her importance as a historical figure. In all of the spaces in which she operated, Murray sought to express the full complexity of her person as a southern-raised self-supporting African American woman radical who built lasting intimate relationships with women yet struggled with her same-sex desires and gender identity. Murray's efforts to embrace the multiple aspects of her identity, although not always visible or spoken, intertwined with and informed her political engagement.
Excerpt above from: Gore, Dayo Folayan. (2004). "Murray, Pauli." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 281-282. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600342/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=3ade2332.
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Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family by ISBN: 0807072095Publication Date: 1999-08-01First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master's sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.
Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet by ISBN: 0870495968Publication Date: 1989-06-23The autobiography of Pauli Murray. Pauli Murray (1910-1985)is regarded as "one of the least discussed figures in the history of twentieth-century African American women's activism." She was a highly regarded Feminist, who called attention to the plight of women, especially the colored and working poor. (Amazon)
Song in a Weary Throat by ISBN: 9781631494581Publication Date: 2018-05-08First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray's Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray's name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. At last, with the republication of this "beautifully crafted" memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents. Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as "my little boy-girl." In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual "in-betweenness"--she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone--that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. We then follow Murray north at the age of seventeen to New York City's Hunter College, to her embrace of Gandhi's Satyagraha--nonviolent resistance--and south again, where she experienced Jim Crow firsthand. An early Freedom Rider, she was arrested in 1940, fifteen years before Rosa Parks' disobedience, for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. Murray's activism led to relationships with Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt--who respectfully referred to Murray as a "firebrand"--and propelled her to a Howard University law degree and a lifelong fight against "Jane Crow" sexism.
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Biography:
Roxane Gay is an American writer of fiction and essays. Although she began publishing her work in the late 1990s, it was not until 2014 that she rose to literary prominence with the publication of her first novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of essays titled Bad Feminist. A survivor of childhood sexual assault, Gay is particularly concerned with writing about the experience of trauma and its aftermath. Her work also explores topics in contemporary popular culture as well as issues dealing with race, body image, sexuality, and desire.
Excerpt above from: Brown, E. (2017). "Gay, Roxane 1974—." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Margaret Mazurkiewicz, vol. 136, Gale, pp. 43-45. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3757700022/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=94b26166.
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Call Number: BF697.5.B63 G39 2018ISBN: 9780062420718Publication Date: 2018-06-12From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. "I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe." In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.
Bad Feminist: Essays by Call Number: HQ1421 .G39 2014ISBN: 9780062282712Publication Date: 2014-08-05A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.
Difficult Women by Call Number: PS3607.A985725 A6 2017ISBN: 9780802125392Publication Date: 2017-01-03A collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. From a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America.
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In her 2017 collection of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby is “once again the inimitably candid, uber-confessional friend readers will happily spend a few hundred pages with,” according to Booklist reviewer Annie Bostrom. Here Irby writes about personal topics such as being black and fat or spending far too much time with her cat, eating junk food, and watching television. She also writes of her lesbian marriage, how to deal with money, and surviving relationships.
Excerpt above from: "Irby, Samantha." (2019). Contemporary Authors, edited by Catherine C. DiMercurio, vol. 418, Gale, pp. 177-179. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2490700089/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=46ef4760.
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Quietly Hostile: Essays by ISBN: 9780593315699Publication Date: 2023-05-16Samantha Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. Irby got a lot of weird emails about Carrie Bradshaw, and not only is there diarrhea to avoid, but now--anaphylactic shock. She is turned away from restaurants for being inappropriately dressed and looks for the best ways to cope, i.e., reveling in the offerings of QVC and adopting a deranged pandemic dog. Quietly Hostile makes light as Irby takes us on another outrageously funny tour of all the gory details that make up the true portrait of a life behind the screenshotted depression memes.
Wow, No Thank You: Essays by ISBN: 9780525563488Publication Date: 2020-03-31Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state where she now hosts book clubs and makes mason jar salads. This is the bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "tv executives slash amateur astrologers" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," who still hides past due bills under her pillow.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays by ISBN: 1101912200Publication Date: 2017Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when life is a dumpster fire. With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, "bitches gotta eat" blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making "adult" budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette, detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms, she's as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.
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A major gay and African American voice in science fiction, Samuel R. Delany is among today's most interesting intellectuals. Born in Harlem in New York City into a middle-class family that lived above his father's funeral home, Delany was educated at Dalton Elementary in Manhattan and the Bronx High School of Science, after which he briefly attended City College of New York. His career as a published science fiction writer began when, following the suggestion of his then-wife Marilyn Hacker, he submitted The Jewels of Aptor (1962) to Ace Books. Delany has published over thirty-five books and is a multiple winner of science fiction's highest honors: the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award. Other honors include the Pilgrim Award for excellence in science fiction scholarship, the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay and Lesbian Writing, and a 2002 induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Delany lives in New York City, the inspiration, topic, and setting for much of his work.
Delany's science fiction analyzes the systems of the world; it reveals social, political, economic, as well as sexual norms to be matters of convention rather than nature. In his hands, science fiction reaches its full potential as a tool for imagining the world differently.
Excerpt above from: Tucker, J. A. (2004). "Delany, Samuel R." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 1, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 295-296. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600144/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=d31425b7.
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Einstein Intersection by Call Number: PS3554.E437 E45 1998ISBN: 0819563366Publication Date: 1998-07-01The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are "different" try to seize history and the day.
Babel-17 by Call Number: PS3554.E437 B33 2001ISBN: 0375706690Publication Date: 2002-01-08Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy's deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack. For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star, the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he's entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village by Call Number: PS3554.E437 Z475 2004ISBN: 9780816645237Publication Date: 2004-05-03Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage.
Wallace Thurman
Image source: The original uploader was SouthernNights at English Wikipedia., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Biography:
Thurman is best known today for his novels The Blacker the Berry (1929), an examination of intraracial prejudice, and Infants of the Spring (1932), a roman à clef and satire of the Harlem Renaissance offering thinly disguised depictions of most of the well-known members of the Harlem intelligentsia. The climax of The Blacker the Berry, the revelation of the dark-skinned heroine's light-skinned lover's bisexuality, provides striking evidence of Thurman's conflicted relationship to both his homosexual desires and his own physical blackness. However, Thurman's major and significantly more positive contribution to the homosexual culture of the period was and remains Infants of the Spring. In this novel, the character of Paul Arbian, based on Richard Bruce Nugent, the Harlem Renaissance figure who came closest to being "out" in the modern sense, places Thurman directly in the line of queer expression stemming from the self-conscious aestheticism of Oscar Wilde. In fact, it is the essential "queerness," racially and sexually, of Thurman's novels that may have led to his relative absence from early discussions of the Harlem Renaissance and to his still unstable and marginalized position in the canon of significant African American writers.
Excerpt above from: Rowden, Terry. (2004). "Thurman, Wallace." Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 3, Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 191. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403600506/GVRL?u=rive58327&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=160966cf.
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- Infants of the Spring by Call Number: PS3539.H96 I5ISBN: 0809308649Publication Date: 1979-03-01In this satire which shows the role of black writers and artists during the American Renaissance of the 1920s, Wallace Thurman proved himself to be a black writer who suffered no fools of any color, a modern satirist who, as republication here shows, was very much ahead of his time.
- The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life by Call Number: PS3539.H96 B5ISBN: 9780020547501Publication Date: 1970-05-01Emma Lou Morgan's skin is black. So black that it's a source of shame to her not only among the largely white community of her hometown of Boise, Idaho, but also among her lighter-skinned family and friends. Seeking a community where she will be accepted, she leaves home at age eighteen, traveling first to Los Angeles and then to New York City, where in the Harlem of the 1920s she finds a vibrant scene of nightclubs and dance halls and parties and love affairs... and, still, rejection by her own race.
The Collected Writings of Wallace ThurmanISBN: 0813533007Publication Date: 2003-08-26This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance scene, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included, among others, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as FIRE!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the opposition of the younger generation against the programmatic and promotional ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic, as well as by claiming for himself a voice as a public intellectual.
