GLORIA NAYLOR is the author of The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Cafe.
ELIZABETH NUNEZ is the author of four novels, including Discretion and Bruised Hibiscus, the winner of an American Book Award. She lives in Amityville, New York. A new novel, Grace, will be published in 2003.
GWENDOLYN M. PARKER is the author of The Passing and These Same Long Bones. She lives in Connecticut.
ALEXS D. PATE 's work has appeared in The Washington Post, Utne Reader, and Artpaper. He is the author of the novels West of Rehobeth, The Multicultiboho Sideshow, Sideshow, Losing Absalom, and Finding Makeba.
AUDREY PETTY teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where she is completing her first novel. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Crab Orchard Review.
CONNIE PORTER is the author of Imani All Mine. She has taught English and creative writing at Emerson College in Massachusetts and at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Porter's Addy books for young readers have sold more than three million copies. Named a regional winner in Granta's Best Young American Novelists contest for her first novel, All-Bright Court, she lives in Virginia.
SCOTT POULSON BRYANT was one of the founding editors of the hip-hop magazine Vibe. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Source, Essence, and Spin magazine. He divides his time between New York and Miami.
NANCY RAWLES is a novelist and playwright who grew up in Los Angeles and began her career as a professional writer in Chicago. Her first novel, Love Like Gumbo, was awarded the 1998 American Book Award and Washington State's Governor's Writers Award, and her plays have been produced in Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Seattle. She lives and teaches creative writing in Seattle. Her next novel, Crawfish Dreams, will be published in 2003.
JEWELL PARKER RHODES is the author of the novels Voodoo Dreams and Magic City and has received a National Endowment for the Arts award in fiction and a Yaddo Creative Writing Residency. Rhodes is also a professor of creative writing and American literature at Arizona State University. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. She is also the author of The African American Guide to Nonfiction and Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors.
NELLY ROSARIO is the author of Song of the Water Saints. She earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She has received numerous awards, including a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, the Bronx Writers' Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship for 1999–2000, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, the 1997 Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction, and most recently she has been chosen as a “Writer on the Verge” by the Village Voice Literary Supplement for 2001. Rosario is published in the anthology Becoming American (Hyperion, 2000). She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter Olivia.
DANZY SENNA is the author of Caucasia. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards. She lives in New York City.
GENARO KY LY SMITH of Lake Charles, Louisiana, won the ninth annual Hurston/Wright Award for his novel excerpt Land South of the Clouds. Smith is a student at McNeese State University.
DAWN TURNER TRICE is the author of Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven and An Eighth of August. She writes for the Chicago Tribune and NPR's Morning Edition. She lives outside Chicago with her husband.
VALERIE WILSON WESLEY is the author of the nationally bestselling Tamara Hayle mystery series, which includes When Death Comes Stealing, Devil's Gonna Get Him, Where Evil Sleeps, No Hiding Place, and Easier to Kill. Her mysteries are also published in Germany, France, Poland, and the UK. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Essence, Ms., The New York Times, and numerous other publications. She was the recipient of the 2000 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do. Ms. Wesley has two daughters and is married to noted screenwriter and playwright Richard Wesley.
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is the author of a number of books including Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, Sent for You Yesterday, Hoop Roots Fever, and The Hiding Place. His work has been widely anthologized.
CRYSTAL WILKINSON is the 2002 recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature and a member of a Lexington-based writing collective, The Affrilachian Poets. She has presented workshops and readings throughout the country, including the Sixth International Conference on the Short Story in English at the University of Iowa and the African American Women Writers Conference at the University of the District of Columbia. She is the author of two books, Blackberries, Blackberries (July 2000), and Water Street (September 2002), both published by Toby Press. Wilkinson is currently Writer in Residence at Eastern Kentucky University.
DAVID WRIGHT is the author of Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Life Savers. His fiction has appeared in Sixty-Four, Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and African American Review. He has published essays on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and the teaching of literacy. His television feature, The Pea Island Story, won a Salute to Excellence First Prize from the National Association of Black Journalists. He has received an NEH Fellowship, a Paul Cuffe Fellowship, and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award.
SHAY YOUNGBLOOD is the Georgia-born author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays, Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. An Edward Albee honoree, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, several NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She is a member of the Writers' Guild of America and the Dramatists' and Authors' Guild. She lives in New York City.
Credits
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint the stories in this volume:
“The Dew Breaker,” by Edwidge Danticat, reprinted by permission from the author; from RL's Dream, by Walter Mosley, copyright © 1995 by Walter Mosley, all rights reserved; “The Boy-Fish” by David Anthony Durham, reprinted by permission from the author; “The Way I See It,” from A Day Late and a Dollar Short, by Terry McMillan, reprinted by permission from the author; from Pride, by Lorene Cary, reprinted by permission from the author; “Mourning Glo,” by Lori Bryant-Woolridge, reprinted by permission from the author; from These Same Long Bones by Gwendolyn Parker, reprinted by permission from the author; “Your Child Can Be a Model!” by David Haynes, © 2001 David Haynes; from Song of the Water Saints, by Nelly Rosario, copyright © 2002 by Nelly Rosario, used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.; “Miss Prissy and the Penitentiary,” by Yolanda Joe, reprinted by permission from the author; “Luminous Days,” by Mitchell Jackson, reprinted by permission from the author; from Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, by Dawn Turner Trice, reprinted by permission from the author; “Sonny-Boy,” from Pictures of a Dying Man, by Agymah Kamau, reprinted by permission from the author; from Water Marked, by Helen Elaine Lee, reprinted by permission from the author; from October Suite by Maxine Clair, copyright © 2001 by Maxine Clair, used by permission of Random House, Inc.; “Like Trees, Walking,” by Ravi Howard, reprinted by permission from the author; “Weight,” by John Edgar Wideman, reprinted by permission from the author; from P. G. County, by Connie Briscoe, reprinted by permission from the author; “My Heavenly Father,” by Dana Crum, copyright © 2000 by Dana Crum, “M
y Heavenly Father” originally appeared in 64 Magazine and is reprinted here by permission of 64 Magazine and the author; “Lion's Blood,” by Steven Barnes, copyright © 2002 by Steven Barnes; “The Knowing,” by Tananarive Due, © 2002 by Tananarive Due; “Luscious,” from Loving Donovan, by Bernice L. McFadden, reprinted by permission from the author; from Crawfish Dreams by Nancy Rawles, reprinted by permission from the author; “Press and Curl,” by Tayari Jones, reprinted by permission from the author (this story inspired the novel Leaving Atlanta, Warner Books, 2002); “I Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Birthin' No Babies,” from The River Where Blood Is Born,” by Sandra Jackson-Opoku, reprinted by permission from the author; “Draggin' the Dog,” by Anika Nailah, © 2002 Anika Nailah; “Museum Guide,” from Black Girl in Paris, by Shay Youngblood, Copyright © 2000 by Shay Youngblood, used by permission of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., and by permission from the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency; “School,” from Miss Black America, by Veronica Chambers, reprinted by permission from the author; “Ghost Story,” from Slapboxing with Jesus, by Victor D. LaValle, reprinted by permission from the author; “Clarity,” by David Wright, reprinted by permission from the author; “My Mama, Your Mama,” from Imani All Mine, by Connie Porter, reprinted by permission from the author; from Rails Under My Back, by Jeffery Renard Allen, reprinted by permission from the author; “Meeting Frederick,” from Douglas's Women, published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, 2002, reprinted by permission from the author; “Eva and Isaiah,” from Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do, by Valerie Wilson Wesley, published by Avon/HarperCollins, 1999, reprinted by permission from the author; “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” by Edward P. Jones, reprinted by permission from the author; “Lucielia Louise Turner,” from The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor, reprinted by permission from the author; “Fortune,” by R. Erica Doyle, reprinted by permission from the author (“Fortune” first appeared in Voices Rising: An Anthology of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Writing); “Are You Experienced?” by Danzy Senna, reprinted by permission from the author; “Love,” by Bertice Berry, reprinted by permission from the author; from Breathing Room, by Patricia Elam, Pocket Books 2001 publication, reprinted by permission from the author; “Love,” excerpted from Drop by Mat Johnson © 2002, reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing; “Antiquated Desires,” by Cris Burks, reprinted by permission from the author; excerpt from the novel Rest for the Weary by Arthur Flowers, reprinted by permission of Ellen Levine Literary Agency, Inc., copyright © Arthur Flowers; “Black and Boo,” by Michael Kayode, reprinted by permission from the author; “Here,” by Audrey Petty, reprinted by permission from the author; “Summer Comes Later,” by Robert Fleming, reprinted by permission from the author; “The Bulging Bag,” by Unoma N. Azuah, reprinted by permission from the author; from Sap Rising, by Christine Lincoln, © 2001 by Christine Lincoln; “Fire: An Origin Tale,” by Faith Adiele, reprinted by permission from the author; “Tan Son Nhut Aiport, Ho Chi Minh City, 1997,” from The Land South of the Clouds, by Genaro Ky Ly Smith, reprinted by permission from the author; “Between Black and White,” by Nicole Bailey-Williams, reprinted by permission from the author; “Hincty,” from The Chosen People, by Karen Bates, © 2002 by Karen Grigsby Bates, from The Chosen People, An Alex Powell Novel; “To Haiti or to Hell,” by Alexs Pate, reprinted by permission from the author; “Mirror Image,” by Amy Du Bois Barnett, reprinted by permission from the author; from What You Owe Me, by Bebe Moore Campbell, reprinted by permission from the author; “My Girl Mona,” by Crystal Wilkinson, reprinted by permission from the author (this work was winner at the Indiana Review's 2002 Fiction Prize and appears in Crystal Wilkinson's second book Water Street, 1979, released from Toby Press in Fall 2002).
GUMBO. Copyright © 2002 by E. Lynn Harris and Marita Golden. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Gumbo: a celebration of African American writing / edited by Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. American literature—African American authors. 2. African Americans—Literary collections. I. Golden, Marita. II. Harris, E. Lynn.
PS508.N3 G86 2002
810.8'0896073—dc21
2002068660
eISBN: 978-0-7679-1046-0
v3.0
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*1Author's note: Section-8, as referenced here, is a federally subsidized program which allocates funds for public and private housing, provided that a fixed number of apartments be set aside for the poor and indigent.
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*2For those readers who are, at bottom, inquisitive, I believe the condition is referred to as Barophobia: Fear of Gravity.
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*3And will do so always, unless sperm or egg is defective.
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*4Federal Reserve Board.
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