The Black Lesbian Writers You Need To Be Reading

Out in the world, I’m primarily known as a publisher of black lesbian and gay literature. Lisa C. Moore, RedBone Press: The two go hand in hand. I’m pleased, and humbled, that I’ve edited works that resonate on so many levels. After shaking my hand or giving me a hug, many black lesbians will tell me their own coming-out story — and oftentimes, they’ve been inspired by RedBone Press’ first book, does your mama know? An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories.

As an editor and publisher, I stay cognizant of the inherent power of publishing. Publishing, after all, means getting your work out there. It’s not just printing a book; rather, it’s getting it into the marketplace of ideas. I wouldn’t do what I do — be who I am — without having read certain books. Like the women who are compelled to thank me for my service, I, too, am forever thankful for the help that books have given me. Call this a genealogy of sorts — my personal book history. It’s the history that shaped me.

Kitchen Table Women Of Color Press

I first encountered the work of Barbara Smith in the early 1980s after reading Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, which she edited. (Home Girls was originally published by Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, and has since been reissued by Rutgers University Press). When I read Home Girls, I was in college in the early ’80s, just learning that there were other lesbians — but I only saw white ones at Louisiana State University. I rode the second wave of feminism and didn’t know it. The wave wasn’t very colorful where I was: I rarely saw images of black women. It didn’t help that I’d always gone to white schools and most of my friends were white. I was a baby feminist, and an even babier lesbian.

Then, at the library, I found these words by Barbara Smith: “[With] Home Girls ... I knew I was onto something, particularly when I considered that so many Black people who are threatened by feminism have argued that by being a Black feminist (particularly if you are also a Lesbian) you have left the race, are no longer a part of the Black community, in short no longer have a home.”

Was that why I couldn’t find the colorful wave? Were the women in this book part of my tribe? Those words resonated (still do), and I wanted more.

I soon learned that Barbara was a co-founder of Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, which published not only Home Girls, but was the second publisher of the seminal anthology This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. And then I learned that she was a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective in 1974. (Go look it up. Black feminism basics!) Barbara and her twin sister, Beverly Smith, grew up in Cleveland; Barbara went to Mount Holyoke and The New School and became a writer and an activist, later writing essays compiled in The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom. Her newest book, the winner of the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Memoir/Biography, is Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, co-edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks. In the mid-1990s I interviewed Barbara Smith while researching feminist presses, trying to figure out how to publish my own first book, and discovered she was smart, witty, and a book nerd — like me.

Alice Dunbar Nelson

The Poetry Foundation

As part of my reading through another important black feminist book, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (co-edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith), I discovered Alice Dunbar Nelson. Born in 1875 in New Orleans, Alice Ruth Moore (later Dunbar and Nelson, after her two husbands) was another smart, witty writer. (Wait! I thought. I’m from New Orleans! My last name is Moore! Could we be...?)

I wrote a paper for one of my classes about Alice; she wrote and published poetry early on (poetry with “homoerotic tendencies,” as they say), and was a syndicated journalist during the Harlem Renaissance, often writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, the black ne