By Nava Atlas | On February 28, 2018 | Updated March 17, 2023 | Comments (2)
Pearl S. Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973), was an American author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a humanitarian and human rights advocate. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born Pearl Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, she was the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries. Her parents had spent much of their years of marriage, from about 1880 on, in China.
They returned to the U.S. shortly before Pearl was born, then, when she was just five months old returned to China, settling in Zhenjiang, a town near Nanking. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On February 28, 2018 | Updated May 5, 2025 | Comments (4)
Georgia Douglas Johnson’s first poems were published in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, in 1916. She published four poetry collections: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and after a long gap, Share My World (1962).
Though considered an important participant in the Harlem Renaissance movement, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was never a New York City resident. Georgia and her family lived in Washington, D.C. Their house on S Street NW came to be known as the “S Street Salon” — a satellite of sorts for writers of the movement visiting in the nation’s segregated capital.
Among the colleagues who were regular visitors were the leading lights of the Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and many of the noted women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Read More→
By Aiyana Edmund | On February 28, 2018 | Updated January 12, 2025 | Comments (4)
As a Black woman science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) blazed a trail when she broke through the then-white male-dominated genre. Here we’ll delve into some fascinating facts about Octavia E. Butler.
In her New York Times obituary, she was described as “an internationally acclaimed science fiction writer whose evocative, often troubling novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power, and ultimately, what it meant to be human.”
It wasn’t easy to break into publishing, but after publishing some short stories, Octavia’s first novel was Patternmaster (1976). It was the first in what would become a four-volume series. Central to these novels are Patternists, people with telepathic powers. Read More→
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