Works by
Marita Golden
(Writer)

Anthologies

• Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing (2002) with E. Lynn Harris
  A literary rent party to benefit the Hurston/Wright Foundation of African-American fiction, with selections to savor from bestselling authors as well as talented rising stars.

• Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex (1993)
  Bringing together fourteen African-American women, Marita Golden has compiled saucy and spicy essays that serve as an exploration into the contemporary black female psyche.

• Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race (1995) Marita Golden and Susan Richards Shreve, eds.
  Candid, poignant, provocative, and informative, the essays and stories in Skin Deep explore a wide spectrum of racial issues between black and white women, from self-identity and competition to childrearing and friendship. Eudora Welty contributes a bittersweet story of a one-hundred-year-old black woman whose spirit is as determined and strong as anything in nature. Bestselling author Naomi Wolf recalls her first exposure to racism growing up, examining the subtle forms it can take even among well-meaning people; bell hooks writes about the intersection between black women and feminist politics; and Joyce Carol Oates includes a one-act play in which racial stereotypes are reversed. Among the other writers featured in the collection are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Susan Straight, Mary Morris, and Beverly Lowry. A groundbreaking anthology that reveals surprising insights and hidden truths to a subject too often clouded by misperceptions and easy assumptions,  Skin Deep is a major contribution to understanding our culture.

Fiction

• A Woman's Place (1986)
  The compelling, beautifully told story of three black women who meet at a New England college in the late sixties and form a friendship that will guide them through the changes, the joys, and the tears of the coming years.

• Long Distance Life (1989)
  Caught in the web of history, generations of an African-American family play out their parts on a world stage that constantly changes, protected always by the love of one another, which never will.

• And Do Remember Me (1992)
  In the exciting, yet frightening days of Freedom Summer in 1963, two very different African-American women meet, each to discover in the other an elegant completion of herself. Jessie, running from her sexually abusive father and distant mother, is a born actress. In the movement she discovers an unknown world of personal freedom that could shape her into an extraordinary talent or destroy her from within. Macon, beautiful, fearless, and brilliant, knows she is too good to settle for less than she's worth, but her activism threatens the man she loves.
  
  In a vital time of politics and passion, dedication and distress, two women struggle to recreate themselves and their world--and learn to love the fight.

• The Edge of Heaven (1997)
  The death of a young child can devastate a family. When a parent is responsible for the death, there is very little hope the remaining unit will survive. As The Edge of Heaven begins, Teresa, twenty, is waiting with dread for the return of her mother who has just been released from jail. Twelve years earlier, her little sister fell down a flight of stairs and died--the result of an angry, but wholly unintentional push by her mother.
  
  Teresa is on the cusp of adulthood. Her unresolved feelings toward her mother, her life with her grandmother who is now her guardian in the wake of her father's inability to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and assume responsibility, her concerns about her boyfriend, and her worries about her future conspire to push Teresa toward a new and frightening place.
  
  With a deceptively simple style, Marita Golden once again uses her considerable talents--"her supple prose, convincing dialogue and brisk pacing" (Cleveland Plain Dealer)--to grab your heart and put you in the middle of this almost insupportable scenario. As Teresa comes to terms with the realities of the complexities of life, her inner strength and rapidly growing maturity assure us that her future will be a full one.

• After: A Novel (2006)
  For twelve years Carson Blake inhabited a world of his own creation. Scorned by the father who was incapable of showing him affection and nearly consumed by the mean streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland, Carson did what no one else could: he saved himself.
  After joining the police force and building a family with his wife, Bunny, Carson is finally in control of his life in the enclave where African American wealth and privilege shares the same zip code with black American crime and tragedy. Both Carson and his wife have great careers and three beautiful children: Roslyn, Roseanne, and Juwan. Carson is a devoted father, determined not to be the father that Jimmy Blake was to him. But while Juwan’s astounding artistic talent is his father’s pride, the boy’s close relationship with classmate Will conjures up emotions and questions in Carson that threaten to spill over and poison the entire Blake family.
  And then, one night in March, nearing the end of a routine shift, Carson stops a young black man for speeding. He orders Paul Houston to exit the car and drop to his knees. But when Houston retrieves something from his waistband and turns to face Carson, three shots are fired, one man loses his life and two families are wrenched from everything that came before and hurled into the haunting future of everything that will come after. When it is revealed that Paul, a son of educators and a teacher in Southeast D.C., was only holding a cell phone, Carson’s carefully woven world begins to unravel.
  After is a penetrating work of discovery for a man whose life careens more than once off the edge of disaster. Golden’s astounding prose will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Non-fiction

• Migrations of the Heart (1983)
  Distinguished author and television executive Marita Golden writes movingly about her life -- first as a black activist in the sixties in her hometown Washington, D.C., then as a journalism student in New York. In those turbulent years, she gained a profound understanding of what it means to be black in America.
  While studying in America, she met Femi, an African man. They fell in love and she journeyed to Nigeria to become his wife. In Africa, plunged into a culture so very different from her own, but one she felt she should understand, Marita Golden learned about both her own new sprawling Nigerian family and Nigeria's large American community.
  
  But Femi, once her strength, began to insist she fit herself into the strict mold of his society and assume the submissive role of a Nigerian wife.
  
  In her new, strange surroundings, Marita Golden discovered that home is not simply a destination, but rather something you must carry always inside you.

• Saving Our Sons (1994)
  Marita Golden began her writing career with Migrations Of The Heart, a memoir about living with her husband in his native Nigeria. In Migrations, Golden tells how it was only with the birth of her child -- a son -- that she was truly respected, for in that culture males are held in highest esteem. Ten years later, Golden presents, in essence, her son's story. Michael is now in his teens and he, his mother, and his stepfather are haunted by this statistic: The leading cause of death among black males under 21 is homicide. The boy who was surrounded by a warm, loving African tribe is now the kid who arrives home horrified by shootings in his school hallways, and reports that friends are stopped by police for no other reason than that they are black. The son who was revered in one country is, in the U.S., looked upon with scorn by whites and a deep, aching fear by his fellow African-Americans that his life may be casually taken. Through the story of raising her own son, Golden confronts the explosive issues. In her search for the causes of the violence, Golden reassesses the legacy of her own generation's struggle for civil rights. She interviews psychologists, leading African-American thinkers, as well as young black men -- criminals and scholars alike. She asks Lonise Bias, the mother of Len and Jay Bias, how she became an indelible symbol of many parents whose suffering has been transformed into public action. Marita Golden infuses this sociological drama with the hope only a mother's love can engender.

• Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1996)
  Marita Golden began her writing career with Migrations of the Heart, a memoir about living with her husband in his native Nigeria. In Migrations, Golden described how it was only with the birth of her child-a son-that she was truly respected, for in that culture males are held in the highest esteem. Ten years later, in Saving Our Sons, Golden presents, in essence, her son's story.

  Having returned to the United States from Nigeria, Marita and Michael, in his teens, find their lives haunted by evidence of a horrifying statistic: The leading cause of death among Black males under the age of twenty-one is homicide. The boy who was once surrounded by a warm, loving African family is now looked upon with scorn by many Whites and with a deep, aching fear by his fellow African-Americans that his life may be casually taken.

  Through the story of raising her son against the backdrop of a racially divided society, Golden confronts the causes of the violence that surrounds the legacy of her own generation's struggle for civil rights. She talks to psychologists, writers, and young Black men-criminals and scholars both-and explores how single Black mothers are often blamed for troubled youth.

  In this fiercely lyrical and revealing narrative, Golden has created a work of profound and lasting importance: a book that sensitively and uniquely addresses the problems of boyhood and emerging manhood. This is a book in which mothers across the country will see themselves and their sons.

• A Miracle Every Day (1999)
  A Miracle Every Day Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers takes an illuminating and intimate look at flourishing single-mother families. Single motherhood and the children of single mothers have been the subject of overwhelmingly negative statistical analysis. But, asks Marita Golden, where are the studies that analyze the strengths of single mothers, the positive adaptive skills learned by their children, the support systems that help these families work?

  In A Miracle Every Day, Golden, once a single mother herself, and several other single mothers and their family members share their success stories with great honesty and insight. Golden identifies them into guiding themes, making A Miracle Every Day a book that single mothers and their support networks can turn to for wisdom, comfort, and inspiration.

  Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex (2004)
  In a hard-hitting meditation on the role that color plays among African Americans and in wider society, Marita Golden dares to put herself on the line, expressing her fears and rage about how she has navigated through the color complex.
  
  To be sure, this is book is not a pity party—but, rather, a nuanced look at identity, and the irrepressible and graceful will of the human spirit. Peppering her narrative with “Postcards from the Color Complex,” reminiscences of some of the author’s most powerful experiences, Golden takes us inside her world, and inside her heart, to show what a half-century of intraracial and interracial personal politics looks like. We come to see the world through the eyes of the young Marita, and the dualism that existed in her own home: the ebony-hued father, who cherished her and taught her to be “black and proud,” and the lighter-skinned mother, who one summer afternoon admonished Marita while she was outside, “Come on in the house, it’s too hot to be playing out here. I’ve told you don’t go playing in the sun, ’cause as it is, you gonna have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children.”
  
  At every turn in her life—in high school, her black-power college days, as a young married woman in Africa, as a college professor, as an accomplished author, and even today—race and color are the inescapable veils through which Golden has been viewed.
  
  In her most daring book to date, esteemed author Marita Golden has the courage to take on a topic others only talk about behind closed doors.