Description:
A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2019 FROM
Vanity Fair * Vogue * The Huffington Post
A stunning multi-cast audio collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays, and scripts by the brilliant African-American artist and filmmaker, featuring the voices of Nina Collins, Mari, Bahni Turpin, Adenrele Ojo, January LaVoy, and Robin Miles.
Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, "To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us."
That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman's Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author's talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins's short stories, which, striking and powerful in their brevity, reveal the ways in which relationships are both formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage: the screenplay of her film Losing Ground, in which a professor discovers that the student film she's agreed to act in has uncomfortable parallels to her own life; and the script for The Brothers, a play about the potent effects of sexism and racism on a midcentury middle-class black family. And finally, it is in Collins's raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page.
Kathleen Collins's writing brings to life vibrant characters whose quotidian concerns powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African-American experience. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman's Diary is a brilliant compendium of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.
Brief description: Nina Collins was born in New York City in 1969 and attended Barnard College. She had a long career in book publishing, first as a scout and then as an agent, and then left publishing in 2008. She completed a Masters in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and become a certified Life Coach with IPEC. She has four children and lives in Brooklyn, where she consults at Maimonides Medical Center and is a trustee of The Brooklyn Public Library.
Review Quotes:
"Reading Collins work the same themes over again and again across mediums is a rare pleasure--as close as most of us will ever come to her spectacular mind."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"