How to Become a Black Writer: Creating and Honoring Black Stories That Matter (the Power of Black Stories, Inspiration for Black Storytellers)

by Marita Golden, Kwame Alexander (Foreword by)

Overview

How Black Stories Shaped My Own

Award-winning author Marita Golden explores her writing career and how the igniting power of storytelling is still inspiring generations of Black authors today.

A lifetime of stories to tell. Growing up, Marita would listen to bedtime stories of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and many other champions of Black history. Now a champion herself in the literary world, she shares her story in a motivational autobiography you will never forget. How to Become a Black Writer details Marita Golden’s life, career, and the most cherished memories she made along the way. From nurturing her passions during the civil rights movement to celebrating her 40th writing anniversary in D.C., Marita shows that every dreamer can inspire others with their story.

A love letter to Black authors and readers. How to Become a Black Writer is not only just Marita’s story, but can also be the start of yours. Inside, you’ll find lessons and instructions based on her experiences during the renaissance of Black literature to help you cultivate your voice. Featuring timeless knowledge that helped not only Marita, but bestselling storytellers like Nzotake Shange and Toni Morrison, you, too can make a big change in the book publishing world.

Discover meaningful events and the people behind them that helped Marita Golden to become the leading icon she is today, such as:

•       How she was mentored under feminist poet Audre Lorde
•       Life as a groundbreaking journalist at Essence Magazine
•      Co-founding and leading the Hurston-Wright Foundation to help publish Black stories
  

So if you’re looking for more motivational memoirs like Dear Black Girl, Legacy, or Badass Black Girl, you’ll love How to Become a Black Writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684817153
Publisher:	Books That Save Lives
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Marita Golden is a bestselling author, journalist, activist, and consultant famous for crafting over 20 fiction and non-fiction works. Starting as a freelance writer and editor for magazines such as The New York Times and Essence Magazine, she released her debut memoir, Migrations of the Heart, in 1984. Since then, she has published renowned books such as Saving Our Sons and Don’t Play in the Sun, as well as novels like The Edge of Heaven and After. Marita has also led several lectures and workshops, as well as founding the Hurston-Wright Foundation to help current and future Black authors bring their stories to life. She currently lives in Washington D.C.

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, publisher, and New York Times bestselling author of 35 books, including Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Solo, Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, The Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor-winning picture book, The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and his NEWBERY medal-winning middle grade novel, The Crossover. A regular contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, Kwame is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, The Coretta Scott King Author Honor, Three NAACP Image Award Nominations, and the 2017 Inaugural Pat Conroy Legacy Award. In 2018, he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded. Kwame is the Founding Editor of VERSIFY, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that aims to Change the World One Word at a Time.

Kwame's most recent book is Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope. Find out more info on Kwame and where he'll be at www.KwameAlexander.com.

Read an Excerpt

From the Prologue

I found and harnessed my writer’s voice and consciousness during one of the most significant periods in American literary culture: the 1970s '80s and '90s, three decades in which Black women writers expanded the American literary canon and worked to lay to rest some of the most damaging and enduring stereotypes about Black life in America. That work continues today but those decades shaped me and continue to influence the Black-excellence-in-writing of today. This is an important story about political and social change, the impact of literature, and evidence of how African Americans revolutionize and often humanize everything we touch. I wrote my first poetry as a Negro girl and my memoir as a Black woman.

I’ve written this ode to the act of writing for readers, current writers, writers yet to realize that’s who they are, writers unborn, and everyone who has learned how to Breathe and to Be, as a result of Story and stories. That’s all of us. How to write a successful narrative, one that engages the reader, provokes emotions, and enlarges the reader’s world is a sublime mystery. A mystery that writers seek to solve again and again. Every book I’ve written was an assignment from God, a spark from the Big Bang, fingerprinted by quantum physics. Writing begins as a Rubik's cube of possibilities, questions, and puzzles. One of my greatest joys in life is to work with the clay of all of that. In this book am honoring people, but I am also honoring process, persistence, dedication, and hard work.

Leo Tolstoy, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Oliver, Richard Wright, Frederick Douglass, and a global constellation of past and present writers have and continue to inspire me. A story well-told is a bridge into the heart of the writer and their world. A bridge that eradicates barriers to empathy and connection. A Black story is a life story as universal as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is assumed by all to be. We all, the default setting for humanity. By the end of this narrative, I hope you realize as have I, that telling a Black life story, imagining a Black life story, and telling that story true is an act of heroism. Just think about the wondrous depth of the literary genetic code connecting W.E.B. DuBois and Octavia Butler, William Wells Brown, and Toni Morrison to the rivers Langston Hughes knew. Each book I have written taught me how to write it. I have been a student and a master of the text. I’ve always written to be read. This time I’m writing to inspire. Come, take my hand…

Editorial Reviews

Marita Golden is a living and breathing gift to America, and to this world, through her writing, teaching, and helping of others. Marita Golden’s journey has been one of communion and community, of literature and the search for freedom for herself, for all people. With her new book How to Become a Black Writer: Creating & Honoring Black Stories That Matter, Marita Golden presents us with a text that is a virtual master class: it is part memoir, part history, and part meditation on race, gender, identity, and how we can be seen, and heard and felt when there are those trying to erase our voices, our books, our history.”
—Kevin Powell, GRAMMY-nominated poet and author of 16 books

“Marita Golden is a giant of American literature. Also boasting a small stature, I’ve often wondered how all that creativity and fierceness is squeezed into only five feet of brilliant Black woman. Her exquisite fiction and nonfiction have loomed large in my mind.”
—Kwame Alexander

“How to Become a Black Writer is the book I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out on the writer's journey. Part intimate memoir, part living history (Eldridge Cleaver! Toni Morrison! Audre Lorde!) and part love letter to the power of storytelling and the vital necessity of art for Black people, this book would have saved me valuable time and artistic loneliness. Through her storied career, her peerless teaching and her ceaseless activism and institution building, Marita Golden had already done more for Black literature and Black writers than anyone had the right to ask. With this wise and witty volume–this covering, this gift to us–she has somehow done even more.”
—Kimberly Mclarin, author of Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed

“In How to Become a Black Writer, award-winning author and institution builder Marita Golden takes us on an empowering and resourceful personal journey to discover the sorcery of words and the magic that attends her deep love of Black stories and Black lives.”
—Joanne V. Gabbin, founder of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and founder and executive director of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective

“Marita Golden pours love, passion, and wisdom into this writer’s guide for unlocking creativity, purpose, and power. The fascinating life journey that honed her voice and shaped her mission is a template sure to inspire budding writers and affirm established authors.”
—A'Lelia Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker

“Marita Golden’s How to Become a Black Writer is a gift to all Black writers—aspiring, new, and seasoned scribes alike. It is equal parts memoir, pep talk, writers’ toolkit, and historical record of our rich Black literary tradition. Golden beautifully weaves the challenges and triumphs of her life on and off the page to show the many ways of fashioning a creative life. Golden teaches us that we cannot walk this literary road alone and provides a roadmap for how she has built community for herself and sustainable organizations that support Black writers. How to Become a Black Writer is a testament to how our inherited legacies and our ancestors’ dreams nurture us. Golden reminds us that writing is a ministry and that telling transformative stories is sacred work. How to Become a Black Writer is an exquisite read. No matter where you are in your writing journey, Golden’s gems will bless your soul.”
—Jodi M. Savage, author of The Death of a Jaybird: Essays on Mothers and Daughters and the Things They Leave Behind

From the Publisher