On Sunday, June 3rd 2012, Rosa Guy, died of cancer. We mourn the loss of this trailblazing novelist and literary activist. NY Times Obituary
Photo Credit: Carmen L. de Jes's
Rosa Guy was born on September 1, 1925 in Trinidad. Later her family moved to Harlem, New York where they died when Rosa was very young. During World War II Rosa she was a part of the American Negro Theatre. She attended New York University where she studied theater and writing.
In 1950, Guy, along with John Oliver Killens, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore and Walter Christmas, co-founded the Harlem Writer's Guild.
Guy was a member of a Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, which was founded on the Lower East Side of New York City by Calvin Hicks. Other members included, Harold Cruse and LeRoi Jones. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba.
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.
Ruby
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Reading level: Ages 12 and up
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Just Us Books,
Inc. (October 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933491043
ISBN-13: 978-1933491042
Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
Ruby Cathy feels left without friends, without comfort and without love. Then she meets Daphne Duprey, who is "cool, calm, cultured, sophisticated and refined" - everything that Ruby is not. Together, Ruby and Daphne build a relationship that gives each young woman a new understanding of strength, friendship and love.
Format:
Paperback, 1st ed., 168pp.
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.
with Sandra Adell (Introduction) Format: Paperback, 220pp. "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.
Format: Mass Market
Paperback, 185pp. 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. Original publication dates of Ms. Guy's Novels Coffee House Press 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 
My Love, My Love,
or The Peasant Girl
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ISBN: 1566891310
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: August 2002
Bird
at My Window
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ISBN: 1566891116
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: May 2001
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 street corner rapping, avant-garde "free
jazz," and independent cinema focused on street life and the politics of
urban, inner-city life.
The
Friends
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ISBN: 0440226678
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
Pub. Date: January 1996Bird at My Window (1966)
Children of Longing (1971)
The Friends (1973)
Ruby (1976)
Edith Jackson (1978)
The Disappearance (1979)
Mirror of Her Own (1981)
A Measure of Time (1983)
New Guys Around the Block (1983)
Paris, Pee Wee and Big Dog (1984)
My Love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl (1985)
And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987)
http://www.coffeehousepress.org
Trinidad & Tobago, April 27,
1990
http://www.pancaribbean.com/banyan/rosaguy.htm
