Editor's Note

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Rita Dove’s Mother Love, Marita Golden’s Saving Our Sons, Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Ntozake Shange’s Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter, Alice Walker’s The Same River Twice, Dorothy West’s The Wedding—these are but seven of the numerous books black women writers in the United States have recently published. The work of these generations, along with that of their predecessors, has long situated African-American women writers as a dynamism expanding our concept of our national literature and as a force transforming North American literary studies. Not only have general readers and specialists the world over acknowledged the importance of black women as creative writers; literary establishments at home and abroad have also honored them with a variety of awards and appointments for their mastery of forms of prose fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose. One immediately thinks, for example, of the bestowal of MacArthur Foundation Fellows awards upon Paule Marshall (June 1992) and Octavia Butler (June 1995), the appointment of Pulitzer Prize winning Rita Dove to a two-year term (1993-1995) as U.S. Poet Laureate and Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress, the election of Toni Morrison as a Nobel Laureate (1993). We need not continue the list; it is too long. As we celebrate the achievements of these women writers whose creations add an extraordinary dimension to the literary culture of the United States, we often tend to overlook, and sometimes even forget, the work of new and emerging African-American women writers. They, too, rivet us with their novels, their poems, and their plays.

This issue of Callaloo is a marker, a reminder. And its purpose is to provide a sampling of the work of emerging black women writers in the United States—not so much as a record but more as a glimpse at the genius that is to come. Instead of assembling a cross-section of the myriad new voices in creative writing, I decided to focus this issue on only nine writers in their 20s and 30s—four fiction writers, three poets, and two playwrights—artists whose texts represent the high quality and broad scope of the work that the many black women writers of their generation are creating today. I also wanted to offer samples of the work of three visual artists, and of three literary and cultural critics (Katherine Clay Bassard, Farah Griffin, and Saidiya Hartman) of the same generation. As I planned and gathered materials for this special issue of Callaloo, I realized that these artists and critics are truly in conversation with their predecessors as well as with each other. Some of the individuals interviewing the creative writers are their peers, while others are more established writers and critics. To expand that conversation with senior critics and writers, I asked Trudier Harris to write an introduction to the issue and Opal Moore to write an essay ruminating on the work of this new generation of writers. Judith Wilson and Beryl Wright, art historians, provided, respectively, commentaries on the work of Ellen Gallagher, painter, and Lorna Simpson, photographer. In other words, this issue of Callaloo is not inclusive in numbers; it is, however, representative in terms of quality and kind.

Again, this number of Callaloo is the Editor’s Choice, a mere sampling, illustrating what is now being created by a generation of emerging women writers, while signifying what is to come. As thinkers these emerging writers are conscious of the consequences of ideologies and literary traditions, and as craftswomen they are ever mindful that how one speaks is as important as what one says. These are artists: Elizabeth Alexander, Edwidge Danticat, Allison Joseph, Helen Elaine Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Audrey Petty, Patricia Powell, Sharan Strange, and Natasha Trethewey. Perhaps their genius lies in their ability to look, aesthetically and ideationally, three ways simultaneously: into the present, into the future, and into the past. This is how they engage us to read the world.

Finally, this issue of Callaloo is another installment toward one of the continuing goals of the Editor: to identify...