Book Talk: Mary Helen Washington — Paule Marshall - with Soyica Diggs Colbert

Watch author Mary Helen Washington's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora

Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature—bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou—Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.

Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma—Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior—that Washington draws out. Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

Mary Helen Washington began her effort to recover the work of Black writers with four landmark collections of African American literature: Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories of Black Women (1975); Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women (1980); Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, (1987); and Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991). Washington continued this recovery of “forgotten histories” with her 2014 book, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, which received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. Recognizing Washington’s pioneering role in African American literary studies, scholar Ann du Cille wrote, “Mary Helen Washington…has been a key player in efforts to define and institutionalize the fields of African American literature and feminist studies for more than twenty years.” Professor Henry Louis Gates credits Washington’s scholarship as a major influence on the formation of the canon of African American literature.

Washington is in conversation with Soyica Diggs Colbert, the interim Provost and Idol Family Professor in Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and the author of the award-winning book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. She has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a residency at the Schomburg Center, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. Colbert has also lectured nationally and internationally at universities, high schools, and middle schools as well as for civic and art organizations. Colbert’s writing has been featured in the The New York Times, Washington Post, Public Books and American Theatre.

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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers public book talks with today's leading authors and journalists.

Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.

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