Words at the heart of award-winning writing

 

“One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.” – Gloria Naylor

 

Born in New York City on Jan. 25, 1950 Naylor was a professor and novelist best known for The Women of Brewster Place and Mama Day.  She died from a heart attack in 2016.

 

 The daughter of sharecroppers from Mississippi who moved to New York to seek a better life, she grew up in Harlem and became the first member of her family to graduate from high school and attend college.  Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read and encouraged her daughter to both read and keep a journal.   Naylor started writing as a teenager, filling countless notebooks with her stories, poems and observations that formed the basis for her later writing.   

 

While still a student at Brooklyn College and influenced by other popular black writers like Toni Morrison, she began writing stories centered on the lives of the black women she knew or had grown up around.  The first of her 8 novels was The Women of Brewster Place, winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Best First Novel.

 

 “Not only is your story worth telling,” Naylor said, “but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.”