Mary Helen Washington

Mary Helen Washington presents Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life

Distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington presents Paule Marshall—an elegant biography of the author of the seminal Brooklyn coming-of-age novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature—bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou—Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. Here is the first major biography of a brilliantly talented writer and a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly staged a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa. Washington reads from and discusses the book, in honor of this important figure in Black literary history, before an audience Q&A and signing.