African American Women Writers

A collection of 49 stories, poems, essays and interviews about coming out as a black lesbian.

This collection of poems deals with the author's experiences in confronting racism, being an African-American and a lesbian-feminist, and grieving over the loss of a longtime lover.

Short stories that look at the lives of eleven different women. Ms. Moses makes clear that the government doesn't really help the poor. Sahara has spent her whole life caring for other people's children. Maurie questions herself when she is attracted to a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Johnnieruth's mother disapproves of her acting like a "tomboy."

Taking up the perceived tensions between the LGBTQ community and religious African Americans, Marlon Rachquel Moore examines how strategies of anti-homophobic resistance dovetail into broader literary and cultural concerns. In the Life and in the Spirit shows how creative writers integrate expressions of faith or the supernatural with sensuality, desire, and pleasure in a way that highlights a spectrum of black sexualities and gender expressions

More than forty contemporary writers reflect candidly and movingly on what it means to live as women without children. These stories, poems, and personal essays speak directly from--and to--the conflicting, often painful, and sometimes liberating emotions of childless women. The selections move through the ambivalence and denial childless women confront within themselves, to the misunderstanding and hostility they confront in the outside world, toward a space where an acceptance and even celebration of childlessness can begin to take place.