In a professional writing career that spans more than twenty years, Marita Golden has distinguished herself as a novelist, essayist, teacher of writing and literary institution builder. Her fiction includes the novels Long Distance Life, (a best-seller, cited as a Best Book of the Year by Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley), A Woman's Place, And Do Remember Me, and The Edge of Heaven. In the genre of nonfiction, Marita Golden has edited three anthologies, Gumbo: An Anthology of African America Writing with E. Lynn Harris; Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex; and with writer Susan Shreve, Skin Deep: Black and White Women on Race.

As a memoirist and essayist, Golden has authored Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World, and A Miracle Everyday: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers. All of Marita Golden's texts are widely read and used in college courses that represent a wide range of disciplines, from literature, African American Studies, and anthropology, to women's studies.

As a teacher of writing, Marita Golden has held appointments at George Mason University, and Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as a member of the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Program. She has also taught at Emerson College, The University of Lagos (Nigeria), Roxbury Community College, and American University.

Marita Golden has lectured on the topic of literature, women's studies, African-American Studies and African American literature nationally and internationally. She has read from her work and held writer-in-residence positions at many schools, including Brandeis University, Hampton University, Simmons College, Columbia College, William and Mary, Old Dominion University and Howard University. She has also been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Articles and essays by Marita Golden have appeared in Essence Magazine, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Marita Golden founded and served as the first president of the Washington-D.C. based African American Writers Guild. Since 1990 she has headed the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, which presents the nation's only national fiction award for college writers of African descent and an annual summer writer's workshop for Black writers, Hurston/Wright Writers' Week, as well as the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for published Black writers.

Among the awards Marita Golden has received in recognition of her writing career and her work as a "literary cultural worker," are the 2002 Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community, the Barnes and Noble 2001 Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets and Writers; an honorary Doctorate from the University of Richmond; Induction into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University; Woman of the Year Award from Zeta Phi Beta; and a Distinguished Alumni Award from American University.

In the area of community and public service, Marita Golden is a member of the Board of Directors of the Girl Scouts of America, The Authors Guild and has served as a member of the PEN/Faulkner Board, a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award and on the Advisory Committee for the Mobil Pegasus Prize for Literature.
(bio. Courtesy of Marita Golden 2004)

After
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ISBN: 0385512228
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Pub. Date: May 2006
Publisher: Doubleday Publishing

Excerpt from Chapter One

The bullets discharge from the muzzle of officer Carson Blake’s sixteen round Beretta with the tinny explosive popping sound of a toy gun. He will not remember exactly how many shots he fires so wildly. Fires with pure intent. Fires, he is sure, to save his life. In the first seconds after the shattering sound of the bullets subsides, he would say, if sked right then, that he had fired every bullet in his gun. Never before has his gun been so large. Never before has it weighed so much. He’s dizzy and breathless. His hearts beats so fast he can’t believe he is still standing.

When he shoots the man, everything, all of it, unfolds as if in slow motion. He wants to look away. He dares not turn his gaze. The first bullet boring through the man’s thick neck riddled with razor bumps, the force twisting his head to the side, as though he is looking with those astonished, horribly open, not yet dead eyes to see where the bullet comes from. The second bullet piercing the skin of the black leather jacket, lodging in the flesh of his shoulder. The third bullet, fired at his groin, bringing him to his knees, and then onto his face, flat out sprawled on the parking lot forty feet from the entrance to the Chinese Restaurant, The House of Chang.

Staring at the man on the pavement, his body a bloody heap illuminated by the fluorescence of the mall parking lot lights, when Carson Blake sees the cell phone a few feet from the man’s hand, he prays for the ground beneath his feet to shift in a cataclysmic rumble and swallow him whole. A cell phone, he thinks, unbelieving. A cell phone. Not a gun. He hurls a howl, deep, and guttural, into the night. Sinking to his knees, he touches the man, turns him over on his back, sees the bulbous, bloody wound in his neck, smells the stringent odor of his sodden groin, desperate now to find, to feel, a pulse. There is none. There is only the cell phone. Looking up in desperation, Carson sees a sky unfamiliar and frightening, in which he can fathom not a single star, a vastness that makes him wish for wings.

Carson tries to stand but cannot and crawls a few feet away and vomits. When there is no more sickness to spill from his gut, he wipes his mouth and shouts at the dead man, through trembling lips stained with a blistering splash of tears,

“What the fuck were you doing?”
“Why didn’t you just do what I said?”

Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex
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ISBN: 0385507860
Format: Hardcover, 208pp
Pub. Date: April 2004
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated

"To be sure, this book is not a pity party - but, rather, a nuanced look at identity, and the irrepressible and graceful will of the human spirit. Peppering her narrative with "Postcards from the Color Complex," reminiscences of some of the author's most powerful experiences, Golden takes us inside her world, and inside her heart, to show what a half-century of intraracial and interracial personal politics looks like. We come to see the world through the eyes of the young Marita, and the dualism that existed in her own home: the ebony-hued father, who cherished her and taught her to be "black and proud," and the lighter-skinned mother, who one summer afternoon admonished Marita while she was outside, "Come on in the house - it's too hot to be playing out there. I've told you don't play in the sun, 'cause as it is, you gonna have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children."" At every turn in her life - in high school, her black power college days, as a young married woman in Africa, as a college professor, as an accomplished author, and even today - race and color are the inescapable veils through which Golden has been viewed.

 

Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing
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Marita Golden (Editor), E. Lynn Harris (Editor)

ISBN: 0767910419
Format: Paperback, 832pp
Pub. Date: October 2002
Publisher: Broadway Books
Edition Description: 1ST

A literary rent party to benefit the Hurston/Wright Foundation of African-American fiction, with selections to savor from bestselling authors as well as talented rising stars.

Not since Terry McMillan’s Breaking Ice have so many African-American writers been brought together in one volume. A stellar collection of works from more than fifty hot names in fiction, Gumbo represents remarkable synergy. Edited by bestselling luminaries Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, this collection spans new and previously published tales of love and luck, inspiration and violation, hip new worlds and hallowed heritage from voices such as:

• Edwidge Danticat
• Eric Jerome Dickey
• Kenji Jasper
• John Edgar Wideman
• Terry McMillan
• David Anthony Durham
• Bertice Berry
…and many, many more

Also featuring original stories by Golden and Harris themselves, Gumbo heralds the debut of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for Published Black Writers (scheduled for October 2002), and all advances and royalties from the book will support the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Combining authors with a variety of flavorful writing, Gumbo will have readers clamoring for second helpings.

Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World
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ISBN: 0385473036
Format: Paperback, 190pp
Pub. Date: December 1995
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated

Marita Golden began her writing career with Migrations of the Heart, a memoir about living with her husband in his native Nigeria. In Migrations, Golden described how it was only with the birth of her child - a son - that she was truly respected, for in that culture males are held in the highest esteem. Ten years later, in SAVING OUR SONS, Golden presents, in essence, her son's story. Having returned to the United States from Nigeria, Marita and Michael, in his teens, find their lives haunted by evidence of a horrifying statistic: The leading cause of death among black males under the age of twenty-one is homicide.

The boy who was once surrounded by a warm, loving African family is now looked upon with scorn by many whites and with a deep, aching fear by his fellow African-Americans that his life may be casually taken. Through the story of raising her son against the backdrop of a racially divided society, Golden confronts the causes of the violence that surrounds African-American men and reassesses the legacy of her own generation's struggle for civil rights. She talks to psychologists, writers, and young black men - criminals and scholars both - and explores how single black mothers are often blamed for troubled youth. In this fiercely lyrical and revealing narrative, Golden has created a work of profound and lasting importance: a book that sensitively and uniquely addresses the problems of boyhood and emerging manhood. This is a book in which mothers across the country will see themselves and their sons.

Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race
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Marita Golden (Editor), Susan Richards Shreve (Editor)

ISBN: 0385474105
Format: Paperback, 309pp
Pub. Date: July 1996
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated

Candid, poignant, provocative, and informative, the essays and stories in Skin Deep explore a wide spectrum of racial issues between black and white women, from self-identity and competition to childrearing and friendship. Eudora Welty contributes a bittersweet story of a one-hundred-year-old black woman whose spirit is as determined and strong as anything in nature. Bestselling author Naomi Wolf recalls her first exposure to racism growing up, examining the subtle forms it can take even among well-meaning people; bell hooks writes about the intersection between black women and feminist politics; and Joyce Carol Oates includes a one-act play in which racial stereotypes are reversed. Among the other writers featured in the collection are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Susan Straight, Mary Morris, and Beverly Lowry. A groundbreaking anthology that reveals surprising insights and hidden truths to a subject too often clouded by misperceptions and easy assumptions, Skin Deep is a major contribution to understanding our culture.

A Woman's Place
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ISBN: 0345346505
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 227pp
Pub. Date: January 1988
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.
Edition Description: REPRINT

Here is the compelling story of three black women who meet at a New England college in the late sixties and form a friendship that will guide them through the changes, joys and tears of the coming years, as they each search for A Woman's Place.

And Do Remember Me
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ISBN: 0345382714
Format: Paperback, 193pp
Pub. Date: July 1994
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.

In the exciting, yet frightening days of Freedom Summer in 1963, two very different African-American women meet, each to discover in the other an elegant completion of herself. Jessie, running from her sexually abusive father and distant mother, is a born actress. In the movement she discovers an unknown world of personal freedom that could shape her into an extraordinary talent or destroy her from within. Macon, beautiful, fearless, and brilliant, knows she is too good to settle for less than she's worth, but her activism threatens the man she loves.

In a vital time of politics and passion, dedication and distress, two women struggle to recreate themselves and their world—and learn to love the fight.

A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers
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ISBN: 0385483155
Format: Paperback, 144pp
Pub. Date: March 1999
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Incorporated

Single mothers get a break in this welcome, although slim, rebuttal to the frequently cited statistics that children from single- parent homes are destined for trouble. Herself a single mother during her son's critical middle years, novelist Golden (Creative Writing/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; The Edge of Heaven, 1997, etc.) celebrates the sons and daughters of single mothers who are not negative statistics. She was galvanized by a research study that dared to wonder, ``If one out of every twenty-two African American males will be killed by violent crime, what about the other twenty-one? Accordingly, Golden surveyed the lives of single mothers whose children have avoided violence and trouble with the law and appear to be on the road to personal and career success. Among them are Charlotte, who raised five drug-free, jail-free sons in a Washington, D.C., ghetto solely on the income from a job as a school cafeteria worker; Claudia, a lawyer and administrator, who adopted a baby daughter, now grown into a thoughtful and self- confident teenager; and soccer mom Janet, whose marriage to a corporate executive dissolved, leaving her with two children and no ostensible skills... 

--Excerpted From Kirkus Reviews

Related Links

Marita Golden Homepage
http://www.maritagolden.com/

 

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