Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women - Hardcover

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9780393035933: Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039303593X ISBN 13: 9780393035933

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Life Notes is the first collection devoted exclusively to writings from the journals, diaries, and personal notebooks of contemporary Black women by the author of the best-selling Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters. In her foreword to this volume Marcia Ann Gillespie writes, "Keeping a journal is an extraordinarily intimate activity, sharing what we write is to allow another to peer through a delicate window where we stand without covers."
In this beautiful collection of intensely personal testimonies, 50 courageous writers illuminate the complexities of Black women's lives, offering unique reflections about self, family, intimacy, work, politics, life transitions, violation, and recovery. Among the contributors are well-known writers as well as emerging and previously unpublished writers. A diverse group, they are native daughters from three continents and the Caribbean, the youngest an eight-year-old Nigerian girl and the oldest a sixty-five-year-old retired African American telephone operator.

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About the Author:

Patricia Bell-Scott is co-editor of the best-selling Doublestitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, which earned the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize. She is also co-founding editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women and teaches at the University of Georgia.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A moving, eloquent assortment of personal writings from the diaries of contemporary black women, collected by Bell-Scott (coeditor: Doublestitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, 1991--not reviewed) and including excerpts from Alice Walker, Audrey Lorde, Rita Dove, Jamaica Kincaid, and others, as well as selections from lesser-known, unpublished writers. As much about the black woman's struggle to claim a place in a racist, sexist world as about the personal history of each individual writer, the entries here include reflections on everything from abortion to apartheid. The 49 contributors range in age from a nine-year-old Nigerian to a 64-year-old retired African-American telephone operator: all narrate, with stunning candor, the stories of their lives--stories that often include episodes of childhood sexual abuse, struggles with poverty and racism, and battles with cancer. The anthology is dedicated to lesbian poet/activist Audrey Lorde, who died in 1992 and whose cancer journals are among the most arresting here. Intimate, impassioned, often heartbreaking: for general readers as well as to students of African-American literature. Reading through it is immensely rewarding--like having an hourlong, tell-all phone conversation with a close friend. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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