McNally Robinson Panel – Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Last Tuesday I joined authors Bridgett Davis and Martha Southgate to discuss “The Black Female Literary Tradition” at McNally Robinson Books in SoHo. After naming some of our favorite authors (Martha loves Toni Morrison, Bridgett loves Toni Cade Bambara, I love Zora Neale Hurston), we started to discuss the ways different Black women authors impact our work.

Bridgett was really articulate about the effect of reading Louise Merriweather as a young girl, about seeing a Black girl in story. Bridgett’s novel, “Shifting Through Neutral,” is a wonderful narrative celebrating a powerful father-daughter relationship and the gift of mobility the father character gives his daughter.

Martha talked about Nella Larsen’s novels as inspirational for the way they covered fresh territory, for innovation in terms of content, if not so much for writing style. Martha’s latest novel, “Third Girl From the Left,” explores the quest for freedom of a coutry girl from Tulsa who moves to LA to be a movie star during the Blaxploitation Era.

I talked about Jean Toomer as a Black woman writer – even though he was a male writer, of course – simply for the way he renders Black women in “Cane.” I told the audience at McNally about how I came to write Crystelle Mourning, and my hope that, while the book focuses on one woman’s journey, it also celebrates men.

We then moved to contemporary issues facing writers, especially Black women. Martha articulated the feeling of blessed jubilation we all feel about being published at all (three books for Martha!). We each talked about the way the literary fiction and popular fiction (especially street fiction) by Black women writers gets shelved in bookstores and the kind of cover art that corporations select for the Black women writers they publish.

Bridgett shared her experience with the process of going from one cover design to another for her novel – and then to a third for the paperback edition. Each cover has gotten more and more popular or accessible, even though not a word of prose has changed. As happy as she is with her editor and publishing company, she wonders at the marketing plan that changes a cover instead of branding the original hardcover art.

Martha laughed about the woman’s hair on her cover. Martha’s novel is set in the 1970s, and her female protagonist has a ‘fro, but the cover art is actually quite 80s. The sister on her paperback edition wears the long curly tresses we assoicate more with Lisa Bonet back when she was a Cosby kid on TV than with Pam Grier when she was bringing down the man on the big screen.

When Martha acknowledged that there is plenty of chick-lit and popular fiction coming from white women authors these days. I agreed with her. Then I added that the line between literary and chick-lit fiction isn’t blurred for White writers, though it sometimes is for us.

We had an amazing crowd of women and men who added great questions and comments to the discussion. Please check these great women writers out.

Martha’s site: http://www.marthasouthgate.com/

Bridgett’s site: http://www.shiftingthroughneutral.com/