Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Eschewing Social Science and Defying Categorization: An Introduction to Contemporary Black Women Writers
LaToya Jefferson-James
Chapter 1: “You Can’t Run from the Street”: Failed Escapes in Ann Petry’s The Street (1947) and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (2000)
Shahara’Tova V. Dente
Chapter 2: You Can’t Shut Me Up: Using Gwendolyn Brooks to Help Me Be Seen and Heard
Carissa McCray
Chapter 3: Kathleen Collins: BAM Filmmaker and Fiction Writer
Cynthia Davis
Chapter 4: Closed in Silence and Clothed in Heteronormativity and the (Anti)Lesbian Embrace: The Woman’s Plight in Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man and “The Women”
Georgene Bess Montgomery
Chapter 5: Grange’s Grapple and Brownfield’s Battle: Redefining Manhood in Alice Walker’s Third Life of Grange Copeland
Lana N. Lockhart
Chapter 6: Reconnections to Gendered Black Identities in Alice Walker’s The World Will Follow Joy
Linda Mustafa
Chapter 7: Womanist Freedom Dreams: ‘Stay on the Battlefield’ by Sonia Sanchez and Sweet Honey in the Rock
Michael C. Montesano
Chapter 8: Mothers Incognito in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Linda Mustafa
Chapter 9: Love in a Time of Pretentiousness: The Social and Personal Consequences of Romance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Anna E. Schmidt
Chapter 10: Endless Love: The Evolution of Healers in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series
Ebony Gibson
Chapter 11: “I Would Restore What Could Be Restored”: Reclaiming Identity in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling
Rashell Smith-Spears
Chapter 12: Audre Lorde’s Zami as a Speculative Womanist Guide to Self- Actualization in Octavia Butler’s Dawn
Roslyn Nicole Smith
Chapter 13: Arc of Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s Works
Nagueyalti Warren
Chapter 14: Seen and Unseen: The Role of the Venus in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
Jasmine H. Wade
Chapter 15: Eco-Justice as Womanist Practice in Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry
Marta Werbanowska
Chapter 16: Who Fears Death: Necropolitics, Gender, and Radical Ontology in Africanfuturist Literature
Venise N. Adjibodou
Conclusion
About the Contributors