Marita Golden
Biography
Marita Golden
Marita Golden has distinguished herself as a writer, teacher, and literary institution builder. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she grew up in a household where at the age of fourteen her mother told her she was going to write a book one day and her father, a raconteur and history buff, supplemented her formal education with his own in-depth knowledge of African and African American history.
In her first book, a memoir, Migrations of the Heart, she transformed her own experience of marrying a Nigerian and living in Nigeria for several years into a story that has resonated with a wide audience and has become a book used on college campuses around the country in women's studies programs. Her novels, Long Distance Life, A Woman's Place, And Do Remember Me, and The Edge of Heaven, have dramatized the intersection of the personal and the policitcal, as well as the everyday tragedies and triumphs of contemporary African American life. In her nonfiction bookSaving Our Sons, she explored the continuing contradictions and challenges faced by black parents raising male childen in America today. She is also the editor of Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Men, Love, and Sex and the co-editor of Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race. Her latest book is A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers.
In 1983, with Clyde McElevene, she formed the African American Writers Guild, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that offers workshops and support programs for black writers in the metropolitan D.C. area. An active member of the national literary community, Marita Golden has served as a member of the PEN Faulkner board and is currently on the advisory board of the Mobil Pegasus Prize. She is president of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, which presents a summer workshop for black writers and awards the nation's only national award for college fiction writers of African descent.
Marita Golden
