DeFacto Feminism

As I excavate my own activism and naïvely determined black womanhood, I explore key shifts and contradictions in black and female empowerment.

Blackness was a bend in the road ahead, nothing to think about, a sci-fi alien ship floating on the screen of life far away.

San Francisco was the sorceress with her hands out.

My California Childhood — a freedom childhood

Where was my story? Where was my truth? Who would want to read it? I could only answer these questions by writing the story, bit by bit, draft by draft. Finally I published that novel of the female foot soldier in the movement, herstory so deeply buried it took a while to excavate it.

It used real-life spoken language of black people, but often underplayed the complexity of black life. I wanted to use real-life spoken language and probe the complexities of the black experience.

Another body of literature developed: the black chick lit phenomenon, heralded by Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale in 1992.

I was acquiring skills that fed my fiction-writing, and the dream was evolving.

I began writing plays. Eventually seventeen of my plays would make it to small stages in New York City and the Bay Area.

After working as a teacher and journalist for a few years,