Shay Youngblood, Author and Playwright

Meet Shay Youngblood
Shay Youngblood
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"From the time I got my first library card I wanted to read all the books in the world."

Shay Youngblood is the author of "The Big Momma Stories" (Firebrand Books). Her plays, produced nation-wide, include "Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery" and the Lorraine Hansberry Award-winning drama, "Talking Bones." Her first novel, "Soul Kiss" will appeared in May, 1997. She has been awarded residences at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Reading has been one of Shay Youngblood's most enjoyed activities since the moment, as a child, when she could first understand the words on the page. "The best dream I've ever had, next to the flying dream," she writes, "was the one in which I lived in a library." The author takes long walks several times a week equipped with a pen and a small notebook to capture inspiration. "When I'm deep in a writing project, I take my characters for a walk daily. I clear my mind of everything and try to figure out problems in a scene or just try to let my characters talk to me or to each other, and I write down what they say." The most frightening book that Youngblood has ever read was THE END OF ALICE by A. M. Homes. "The author created a character and a world so believable, so disturbing, so graphic in its visual and emotional violence," Youngblood says with a shudder, "that after I read it, I couldn't go to sleep with the book in my house."

Soul Kiss
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Read the transcript of an on-line chat featuring Shay Youngblood discussing Soul Kiss

From her beautiful but absent mother, young Mariah has inherited an unquenchable thirst for words, and the feelings of comfort and hope that define them. Left in the care of her elderly aunts, she grows up in a state of unfulfilled longing, waiting, for her mother's return. When the longing becomes too great, she spends a stint with her father Matisse, who loves his daughter dearly but is too tempted by lingering evidence of his former wife he sees in Mariah. Soul Kiss is both Mariah's realization of her burgeoning sexuality and her resignation to the sadness and abuse she must endure in search of a love that stays.

Publisher: Berkley Publishing
Date Published: March 1998
Format: Trade Paper

The Big Mama Stories Big Mama Stories
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From Publisher's Weekly:
These folktale-like stories, told by a young woman about her ``mamas''--the several women who raised her following the death of her mother--capture the dialect and climate of the black South of the '60s. Each work centers around one of the mamas; the narrative voice throughout is intimate and assured--Youngblood maintains a near-flawless cadence and a consistent tone with subtlety and grace. Unfortunately, a taut style cannot compensate for the flatness of her characters and the predictability of their actions. The issues addressed in this fiction debut--obsessive love, parenting, loyalty, continuity, the initiation of a girl into womanhood--are trivialized by cursory treatment of the characters and superficial interpretations. Incompletely or insufficiently differentiated, Youngblood's women begin to blur. Although she may have intended to overlap their personalities in order to demonstrate that the combined resources of many ``mamas'' in raising the protagonist are more effective than those of one woman alone, the resulting homogeneity inhibits this collection.

Publisher: Firebrand Books
Date Published: October 1992
Format: Trade Paper