Rosa Guy
Photo: Carmen L. de Jes�s
Rosa Guy is the author of fifteen novels, including My Love, My Love, and is the editor and translator of several volumes. Guy, along with with John Oliver Killens, co-founded the Harlem Writer�s Guild. Her work has received the Coretta Scott King Award, The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association's Best Book Award. She lives in New York.
My Love, My Love,
or The Peasant Girl
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Amazon
Format:
Paperback, 1st ed., 168pp.
ISBN: 1566891310
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: August 2002
Selected for AALBC.com's On-line Book Cub Reading List - July 2003
"Adapted into the highly successful Broadway musical Once on This Island (nominated for eight Tony Awards), Rosa Guy's tropical retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's fable "The Little Mermaid" is the tragic love story of Desiree, the beautiful peasant girl who devotes herself body and soul to a handsome urban "prince" whose life she has saved from an accident near her village." Unfortunately, his upper-class family feels that Desiree's skin is too dark and her family too poor for a boy who will be king, and Desiree proves that she is willing to give everything, even her young life, for the purest love she has ever known.
Bird
at My Window
with Sandra Adell (Introduction)
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Format: Paperback, 220pp.
ISBN: 1566891116
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: May 2001
"This book was welcomed when it was first published in 1966. Its brave examination of a loving, yet painful, relationship between a Black mother and her son is even more important today. Rosa Guy is a fine writer and she continually gives us new issues to contemplate. Welcome Bird at My Window." - Maya Angelou
Rosa
Guy's powerful first novel follows Wade Williams, a young and brilliant black
man who wakes in a mental hospital and is told he has assaulted his sister.
Unable to recall the circumstances that brought him to commit this unthinkable
act, Wade retraces his steps and reveals the rich complexity of
mid-twentieth-century Harlem and its mothers, sons, and daughters whose
aspirations prevail and perish within both white and black America. An
engrossing personal story and a razor-sharp cultural critique, Bird at My Window
is the third title in Coffee House Press's acclaimed Black Arts Movement
Series.
Bird at My Window draws our attention to an important phenomenon of recent
national history. The energetic and highly self-conscious
Black Arts Movement
accompanied and fostered an explosion of urban black popular culture of the
1960s and 1970s. Its long-term influence is evident today in, for example, the
strength and popularity of Hip Hop culture. The Black Arts Movement's legacy
includes performance poetry and streetcorner rapping, avant-garde "free
jazz," and independent cinema focused on streetlife and the politics of
urban, inner-city life.
The
Friends
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Format: Mass Market
Paperback, 185pp.
ISBN: 0440226678
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
Pub. Date: January 1996
Phyllisia eventually
recognizes that her own selfish pride rather than her mother's death and her
father's tyrannical behavior created the gulf between her and her best friend.
Coffee House Press
http://www.coffeehousepress.org
In
an innovative partnering with African American scholars and authors, Coffee
House Press has created an editorial panel to guide selection of titles for this
series. Editorial board member John Wright, associate professor of Afro-American
Studies, African Studies, and English at the University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities Campus, says, "we have chosen work that is masterful, and that
deserves another chance and other audiences, to keep the windows to the future
open."
Interview with Rosa Guy2nd International Conference of Caribbean Women Writers
Trinidad & Tobago, April 27, 1990
http://www.pancaribbean.com/banyan/rosaguy.htm
