Rosa Guy
Photo: Carmen L. de Jesús

Rosa Guy is the author of fifteen novels, including My Love, My Love, and is the editor and translator of several volumes. Guy, along with with John Oliver Killens, co-founded the Harlem Writer’s Guild.  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.

My Love, My Love, or The Peasant Girl
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Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 168pp.
ISBN: 1566891310
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: August  2002

Bird at My Window 
with Sandra Adell (Introduction)
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Format: Paperback, 220pp.
ISBN: 1566891116
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pub. Date: May  2001

"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.

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 streetcorner rapping, avant-garde "free jazz," and independent cinema focused on streetlife and the politics of urban, inner-city life.

The Friends 
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Format: Mass Market Paperback, 185pp.
ISBN: 0440226678
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
Pub. Date: January  1996

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.

Coffee House Press
http://www.coffeehousepress.org

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
Trinidad & Tobago, April 27, 1990
http://www.pancaribbean.com/banyan/rosaguy.htm

 

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