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Lesfic Authors of Color Directory
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Biography
Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.
Walker has written many bestsellers; among them, The Temple of My Familiar (a wisdom tale that originates in prehistory); By The Light of My Father’s Smile ( sexuality and forgiveness as paths of healing); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which explores the effects of female genital mutilation on one woman’s psyche as well as her body (she becomes a patient of a fictional Carl Jung). This novel led to the 1993 book and documentary film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, both collaborations with British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.(Meditations on spiritual and political issues).
Her other novels are: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (one family’s struggle to survive the sharecropping system – slavery under another name – in the South), Meridian (a spiritual biography of The Civil Rights Movement), The Color Purple (liberation from enforced, male dominant, religion and thought; also poses the question never asked by societies in which they occur: what becomes of the children whose parents are lynched/assassinated?) and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart (a couple on the verge of separating decides to live together, fully in the present, despite awareness of the universal unraveling of societies around the globe).
Her short story collections include: In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women ( poor and marginalized women of color make choices reflecting their status in life) and You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (the spirit of woman rises with the smallest encouragement; one of our most valuable human contributions) and The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart (after a painful divorce, a woman opens herself to the heartbreak offered by the world, and loves the world enough to persevere).
There are seven volumes of poems. Among them: Once, Revolutionary Petunias, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You In the Morning, Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Absolute Trust In the Goodness of the Earth, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness Into Flowers.
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose examines the creative inheritance of one’s maternal line, and how our own contributions,whether political, activist, or poetic connect on this foundation. Essays in Living By the Word reflect Walker’s Earth and Womanist based spirituality. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism ( explores activism as a source of inspiration), The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult chronicles the adventure of having a film made of her novel The Color Purple and weathering storms of censorship, banning, criticism, and verbal attack.
Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker, in 2006, was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame. In 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University in her birth state of Georgia. In 2010 she presented the keynote address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she met the beautiful sons of Steve Biko, and was awarded the Lennon/Ono Peace Grant in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she met John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “beautiful boy” Sean Lennon. (Walker donated this latter award to an orphanage for the children of AIDS victims in East Africa, The Margaret Okari Foundation in Kisi, Kenya). She served as jurist (2010 and 2012)for two sessions of The Russell Tribunal on Palestine. In Cape Town, South Africa, and NYC, New York.
Recent works are: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel; Hard Times Require Furious Dancing; The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker; and The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories, a Memoir. She also writes regularly on her blog site at http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com.
Two new books were presented in Spring of 2013: The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way; and The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, poems.
Walker has been an activist all of her adult life, and believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all. She is a staunch defender not only of human rights, but of the rights of all living beings. She is one of the world’s most prolific writers, yet continues to travel the world to literally stand on the side of the poor, and the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed. She also stands, however, on the side of the revolutionaries, teachers and leaders who seek change and transformation of the world. Upon returning from Gaza in 2008, Walker said, “Going to Gaza was our opportunity to remind the people of Gaza and ourselves that we belong to the same world: the world where grief is not only acknowledged, but shared; where we see injustice and call it by its name; where we see suffering and know the one who stands and sees is also harmed, but not nearly so much as the one who stands and sees and says and does nothing.”
Alice Walker was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction 2016.
Biography
Tanai started writing strange little novels at the age of fourteen and dreamed of becoming a published author. She is a hard-core musicphile and enjoys everything from Bluegrass to Rap to Metal. She has an extensive collection of digital music files, CDs, and vinyl. Tanai is a total fangirl. The generous space allotted in this biography is not big enough to even begin to list all of her favorite fandoms. She studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Houston and uses what she learned there for her second passion, teaching art to inner city youth. She lives with her hilarious, wonderful wife, Janette, and their three dogs, Zeus, Zoey, and Beto.
Biography
Yolanda Wallace is not a professional writer, but she plays one in her spare time. Her love of travel and adventure has helped her pen the globe-spanning novels Rum Spring, Lucky Loser, Murphy’s Law, The War Within, Break Point, True Colors, and the Lambda Literary Award winning Month of Sundays, as well as novels written as Mason Dixon, which include the Lambda Literary Award finalist Date with Destiny. Her short stories have appeared in multiple anthologies including Romantic Interludes 2: Secrets and Women of the Dark Streets.
She and her wife live in beautiful coastal Georgia, where they are parents to two children of the four-legged variety.
Biography
Dillon Watson resides in the southeastern United States. She fell in love with romance novels in the seventh grade and has been writing them ever since. In addition to her novels, her short stories can be found in Erotic Interludes 4: Extreme Passions and Longing, Lust and Love: Black Lesbian Stories. When she is not writing, she is reading.
Biography
After years of meddling in her friends’ love lives, Rebekah Weatherspoon turned to writing romance to get her fix. Raised in Southern New Hampshire, Rebekah Weatherspoon now lives in Southern California where she will remain forever because she hates moving.
Her BDSM romance At Her Feet won the Golden Crown Literary Award for erotic lesbian fiction. Her novella FIT (#1 in the FIT Trilogy) won the Romantic Times Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Erotica Novella, SATED (#3 in the FIT Trilogy) was nominated for the the Romantic Times Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Digital Erotic Romance and most recently SOUL TO KEEP VSS#3 won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Erotica.
Her 2018 romantic comedy RAFE: A Buff Male Nanny received praise from both Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times. Rebekah’s most recent release HARBOR, the final installment in her Beards & Bondage trilogy is available now. Look for IF THE BOOT fits, the second book in her COWBOYS OF CALIFORNIA trilogy, out Fall 2020 from Kensington Books.
Biography
Anondra “Kat” Williams is writer, poet, radio host and all around lover of words. Her first foray into writing was “black girl love” released in 2011 and her second book “SistaGirl” released August 2013. Both are a collection of short stories and poetry, detailing everyday love and life between women who love women.
Since then she has written her first novela “Pat Greene” to and is in the process of finishing her “Savannah” her first novel.
In 2009 she started Shades Retreat: Personal, You. Shades Retreat is a empowerment, growth and change retreat for queer women of color.
Biography
KD is a Southerner and a former nomad, taking up residence in the Mid-West, east coast, and New Orleans over the years. She was a Hurricane Katrina survivor displaced to the mountains of North Carolina but has since found her way back to Louisiana where she lives with her wife and the most horribly spoiled pets in history.
She enjoys all things geek from video games to super heroes. KD is a veteran in the mental health field where she works with children and their families. She discovered writing as a teenager with the help of her English teacher, whom she had a huge crush on. With her teacher’s help, KD wrote her first short story but afterward had a hard time finding inspiration. Years later, writing fanfic became her gateway into lesbian fiction.
Biography
While Jade Winters has been putting words together since she was a child, it wasn’t until 2010 that she became a serious writer.
Today, as a full-time author, she has published several novels in the lesbian fiction genre as well as a number of short stories.
Jade was born and educated in London where she studied journalism for three years at a London University.
Jade now makes her home in Dorset in the South of England with her partner and furry companions Zorro, Buttons and Zeus.