They are bi-racial and multicultural, and they fill their pens with the indelible ink of identity and sex. They are their mothers' daughters, and nothing at all like them. Today's black women authors write in voices their literary forebears had to keep to a whisper.
Weaned on the works of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Maya Angelou, the new wave of black woman writers are also the children of Black power, Fat Albert, and the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Some attended posh, and predominately white, boarding schools, earned their M.F.A's, and write for a living, not just when they can find the time. Shaking the Tree, a collection of new fiction and memoir from the vanguard of America's up and coming black women writers.
