Go There To Know There

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." (Alice Walker) Alice Walker, (born 1944), the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple . The author of multiple novels, volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, children's books, and essays, she is perhaps best known for the landmark novel that focuses on Celie, a disaffected black woman from the rural South who has been deliberately disconnected from her children. Our text points out that Walker was interviewed in 1973 by scholar Mary Helen Washington, in which the author professed a commitment to portraying the lives of black women in her novels. Gates, et al. observe that Walker "described the three types of black women characters she felt were missing from much of the literature of the United States. The first were those who were exploited both physically and emotionally, whose lives were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness, ...

According to the Huffington Post 's special section entitled Black Voices , Jamaica Kincaid is a "badass." Well, this is not news.  photo from  Huffington Post/Black Voices However, Joseph Erbentraut has discovered the "Twelve Reasons Why" Kincaid continues to impress a new generation of readers, which can be read in full here .  "Jamaica Kincaid is simply not one to mince words. When she speaks, the revered 65-year-old Antiguan-American novelist does so deliberately -- and she's not afraid to interrupt a question when she sees it fit. Kincaid, who got her start at the New Yorker during the magazine's William Shawn era in the '70s, has produced work that has earned her an enviable list of awards, including  an American Book Award  for her latest novel, 2013's  See Now Then . One gets the impression Kincaid is afraid of nothing -- something that comes across in her writing, as well. Her work, at times, has been criticized for...