Harlem Writers Guild

During the 1950s MA , with competence as a singer and success as a dancer already under her belt, developed the ambition of becoming a writer. She began with sketches, song lyrics, and short stories...

When her mother allowed her to leave school, she resolved to get a job on the San Francisco street cars, which had never employed a coloured person (though it later turned out that a mixed-race...

Back in the USA, when a projected vocation in politics died with Malcolm X , she returned to nightclub singing, then, after recuperating emotionally, to the dream of becoming a writer. Meanwhile she got a...

The events that led up to this book were the devastating murder of Martin Luther King and the success of MA 's tv series Black, Blues, Black. Then an editor at Random House suggested...

Chapter one opens on MA 's ambition to become a writer: her first beginnings, her move to New York, her joining the Harlem Writers Guild , the terrifying experience of her first reading to...