Originally published in 1984, this long-out-of-print collection of interviews with Black women writers has reemerged to educate and inspire a new generation of readers. Black Women Writers at Work, out January 10 from Haymarket Books, offers interviews with literary giants, among them two women with local ties: Maya Angelou and Ntozake Shange.
In these interviews, writers reflect on whom they write for and their responsibilities, as well as the places where fiction and lived experience overlap. Their responses are both candid full of insights. In Angelou’s section, for example, she responds to a question about whether she envisioned Maya (the character) as symbolic of every Black girl growing up in America. “Yes, after a while I did,” she says. “It’s a strange condition, being an autobiographer and a poet. I have to be so internal, and yet while writing, I have to be apart from the story so that I don’t fall into indulgence… It’s damned difficult for me to preserve this distancing. But it’s very necessary.”
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Claudia Tate, a noted literary critic and Princeton University professor of English and African American studies, thoughtfully interviewed each of the 14 writers. Tate says in her engaging introduction that the book’s goal is to capture the lives and thoughts of these women, whose work is inextricably linked to their experiences as Black women in America. “This book originates in this belief,” she writes, “that no one can promote the Black woman writer’s literary well-being better than she can herself.” In reissuing Tate’s collection, these voices of the recent past are once again allowed to do just that.
