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Celebrating the Rise of Black Women Fiction Writers
From Zora to Toni & Toni to Marita to Jennifer Cauley Maritza, the stories keep flowing
It was in the 1980s that I began to discover African-American fiction written by Black women. I was a new writer, a poet, a short story writer, and reading the law, as they say. Fiction (mostly African-American fiction) was my escape from the tough terror of pursuing a Juris Doctorate from a law school. I read as much fiction as I could: James Baldwin. Chester Himes. Richard Wright. Ralph Ellison. John A. Williams. Ishmael Reed. William Melvin Kelly.
The Black men fiction writers were great, but when I discovered Black women fiction writers, it was the best of times. I had to catch up some, but that made it even better.
I started with Alice Walker’s Meridian, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), and then Sula (1973), also by Morrison. Gayle Jones’s Corregidora (1976) was also on my instant classic reading list. I consumed all of these books and then would wait patiently for more. This is before the boom period of Black women’s fiction where Walker, Morrison, Naylor, and Terry McMillan were selling books like they were cold beers at a baseball game.
Thereafter, I met Marita Golden, the celebrated writer from Washington D.C. who lived…
