Photo © Joyce Middler (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995) Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade on March 25, 1939, lived the first ten years of her life in Harlem. Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, activist, feminist, and filmmaker. In 1982, in a taped interview with Kay Bonetti, Bambara reflected on her work: "When I look back at my work with any little distance the two characteristics that jump out at me is one, the tremendous capacity for laughter, but also a tremendous capacity for rage." Bambara spent her entire life writing about both. Her ability to laugh and imbue laughter into her stories came from her strong conviction and belief in family and community. Her rage came from the injustices she saw in the treatment of children, the elderly, and the oppressed black community bio excerpted from  University of Minnesota. All rights reserved read full in depth citation at http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/bambara_toni_cade.html

Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Fiction, Essays, and Conversations Click to order via Amazon Paperback: 272 pages Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Contemporaries Ed edition (January 26, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0679774076 This compilation of selected short fiction, essays and interviews by (and with) the late Bambara (The Salt Eaters) is her first published work in 14 years, and it provides intriguing insights into this challenging African American writer. The collection includes a warm, appreciative preface by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who also edited this volume. The six stories feature characters who seek self-definition through their relationships with others: in "Going Critical," a mother slowly dying from radiation poisoning reflects on her relationship with her daughter during a day at the beach; and two boys are puzzled by the community's warm reception of a painter who transforms their favorite landmark and play area in "The War of the Wall." The second section features Bambara's voice much more clearly, as she tackles discursively the social and political concerns, often about race and gender, that animate her fiction. Her film criticism is especially trenchant: she discusses blaxploitation films of the 1960s and '70s, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Spike Lee's School Daze with a sharp eye for their complexity, message and vision. She also questions the assumptions behind our daily language, provoking readers to think in more complicated terms. Bambara (1939-1995) never made any bones about the fact that she viewed writing as a political act. The writings collected here show that, unlike many others, she rarely let her activist motives cripple her aesthetic sense or her intellectual honesty. –Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gorilla, My Love Click to order via Amazon Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Vintage (June 30, 1992) Language: English ISBN-10: 0679738983 In these fifteen superb stories, written in a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable, Toni Cade Bambara gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North CaroLina. A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches o white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.

The Salt Eaters Click to order via Amazon Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Vintage (June 30, 1992) Language: English ISBN-10: 0679740767 Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.

Those Bones Are Not My Child Click to order via Amazon Paperback: 688 pages Publisher: Vintage (October 24, 2000) Language: English ISBN-10: 0679774084 On a Friday night in July 1979, the first victim in what would come to be called the Atlanta Child Murders disappeared. Over the course of two years, more than 40 African American children would die--abused, mutilated, strangled--before an arrest in 1981 apparently settled the issue. Wayne Williams, a black man, was accused, tried, and convicted of the murders, and the good citizens of Atlanta breathed easy again, assured that the crimes had not been racially motivated after all, and that the criminal was behind bars. Or was he? In her posthumously published novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, Toni Cade Bambara revisits the summer of 1980 and suggests a chilling alternative: The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day. There've been no new cases of kidnap and murder since the arrest back in June. You've good reason to know that the official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the hedge, as though in clearing the leaves you can clear from your mind all that you know. You'd truly like to know less. You want to believe. It is 3:23 on your Mother's Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight. The protagonist of Bambara's novel is Marzala Rawls Spencer, an African American mother of three who is managing--just--to raise her family, hold down three jobs, and attend night school. When her 12-year-old son, Sundiata, doesn't return from a camping trip, Zala finds herself plunged into the nightmarish possibility that he has become the latest victim in the series of murders rocking the "City Too Busy to Hate." As she and her estranged husband, Spence, frantically attempt to discover what has happened to their child, the book takes them through the complicated morass of politics, race relations, and class that bedevil Atlanta--and perhaps obstruct the search for the true killer. Bambara worked on Those Bones Are Not My Child for 12 years before her death in 1995. Toni Morrison edited the manuscript for publication, and though the occasional rough edge shows through, the well-drawn characters and inherent human drama in this stranger-than-fiction tale overcome its minor weaknesses. This is the novel Toni Cade Bambara will be remembered for, and rightly so. –Amazon.com (Alix Wilber)

The Black Woman: An Anthology Click to order via Amazon edited by Toni Cade Bambara Paperback Publisher: Washington Square Press (March 29, 2005) Language: English ISBN-10: 0743476972 When it was first published in 1970, The Black Woman introduced readers to an astonishing new wave of voices that demanded to be heard. In this groundbreaking volume of original essays, poems, and stories, a chorus of outspoken women -- many who would become leaders in their fields: bestselling novelist Alice Walker, poets Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni, writer Paule Marshall, activist Grace Lee Boggs, and musician Abbey Lincoln among them -- tackled issues surrounding race and sex, body image, the economy, politics, labor, and much more. Their words still resonate with truth, relevance, and insight today.