Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present Book

In the last decade, black women writers have come into their own and their voices resonate throughout the world. But is has been a long struggle for recognition. From the eighteenth-century enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, a child of seven who survived the slave ships, learned English, Latin, and Greek, and became the most renowned female poet in eighteenth-century America; to Sojourner Truth, whose voice remains electrifying today; through the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston, "the Genius of the South"; and on to the remarkably gifted generation of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange - this is the story of these women and their epic struggle to recover their voice and their spirit from a past that reached into and through slavery. This is the first full history of black women writers - and their incredible contributions - in America.