LaToya Jefferson-James is assistant professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Eschewing Social Science and Defying Categorization: An Introduction to Contemporary Black Women Writers

LaToya Jefferson-James

Chapter 1: "You Can't Run from the Street": Failed Escapes in Ann Petry's The Street (1947) and Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris (2000)

Shahara'Tova V. Dente

Chapter 2: You Can't Shut Me Up: Using Gwendolyn Brooks to Help Me Be Seen and Heard

Carissa McCray

Chapter 3: Kathleen Collins: BAM Filmmaker and Fiction Writer

Cynthia Davis

Chapter 4: Closed in Silence and Clothed in Heteronormativity and the (Anti)Lesbian Embrace: The Woman's Plight in Gayl Jones' Eva's Man and "The Women"

Georgene Bess Montgomery

Chapter 5: Grange's Grapple and Brownfield's Battle: Redefining Manhood in Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland

Lana N. Lockhart

Chapter 6: Reconnections to Gendered Black Identities in Alice Walker's The World Will Follow Joy

Linda Mustafa

Chapter 7: Womanist Freedom Dreams: 'Stay on the Battlefield' by Sonia Sanchez and Sweet Honey in the Rock

Michael C. Montesano

Chapter 8: Mothers Incognito in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Linda Mustafa

Chapter 9: Love in a Time of Pretentiousness: The Social and Personal Consequences of Romance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Anna E. Schmidt

Chapter 10: Endless Love: The Evolution of Healers in Octavia Butler's Patternist Series

Ebony Gibson

Chapter 11: "I Would Restore What Could Be Restored": Reclaiming Identity in Octavia Butler's Fledgling

Rashell Smith-Spears

Chapter 12: Audre Lorde's Zami as a Speculative Womanist Guide to Self- Actualization in Octavia Butler's Dawn

Roslyn Nicole Smith

Chapter 13: Arc of Memory in Natasha Trethewey's Works

Nagueyalti Warren

Chapter 14: Seen and Unseen: The Role of the Venus in N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

Jasmine H. Wade

Chapter 15: Eco-Justice as Womanist Practice in Contemporary Black Women's Poetry

Marta Werbanowska

Chapter 16: Who Fears Death: Necropolitics, Gender, and Radical Ontology in Africanfuturist Literature

Venise N. Adjibodou

Conclusion

About the Contributors