City on January 25, 1950. Her parents, Roosevelt
and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, were former share-
croppers who migrated north from Robinsonville,
Mississippi. The eldest of three sisters, Naylor, who
was a shy child, graduated high school in 1968.
That same year, she became a Jehovah’s Witness
like her mother. She worked as a missionary for
seven years in New York, North Carolina, and
Florida before deciding to make a career change.
Returning to New York City, she worked full time
as a switchboard operator in several hotels from
1975 to 1981. For a short time she studied nurs-
ing at Medgar Evers College before transferring to
Brooklyn College of the City University of New
York system, where she received a B.A. in English
in 1981. She earned an M.A. in Afro-American
studies from Yale in 1983.
While working and pursing her degrees, Naylor
also launched her writing career, discovered femi-
nism, and immersed herself in African-American
literature. Together, each experience provided her
with the foundation she needed to define herself
as a black woman. In 1979 Naylor began writing
fiction; she submitted a story to ESSENCE magazine,
whose editor, impressed by what she had read, ad-
vised Naylor to continue writing. Before reading
TONI MORRISON’s The Bluest Eye Naylor did not
consider herself a writer. Naylor recalls, “The writ-
ers I had been taught to love were either male or
white,” but Morrison’s novel “said to a young black
woman, struggling to find a mirror of her worth in
this society, not only is your story worth telling but
it can be told in words so painfully eloquent that it
becomes a song” (Naylor, 567).
Each of Naylor’s novels, which she deliberately
links together, details the experiences of black men
and women struggling to survive and succeed in
a racist world. By creating her own distinct liter-
ary landscapes, replete with a wealth of complex
characters; by remodeling classical writers; and by
drawing extensively on the Bible, Naylor creates
her unique vision of modern African-American
society and its complex experiences. Her works re-
flect the literary influence of such writers as ZORA
NEALE HURSTON, Morrison, and NTOZAKE SHANGE.
Naylor is the author of five novels. Her popular
first novel, The WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE (1982),
winner of the National Book Award for first fic-
tion in 1983, centers on seven women from diverse
backgrounds who manage to blossom and bloom,
despite their location in an impoverished neigh-
borhood on a dead-end urban street, by bonding
and finding solace in one another. Their experi-
ences run the gamut from those of Mattie Johnson,
a single, doting mother, and Sophie, the neighbor-
hood gossip, to Black Nationalist Kiswana Browne
and lesbian lovers Lorraine and Theresa. The
Women of Brewster Place was made into a popular
television miniseries in 1989, produced by Oprah
Winfrey and Carole Isenberg.
Naylor’s second novel, Linden Hills (1985),
which was her master’s thesis at Yale, is a story of
resistance and rebirth; it portrays a world in which
middle-class blacks achieve status and some mea-
sure of power, but at an expensive price, for in the
interim they lose their hearts and souls. In her am-
bitious third novel, MAMA DAY (1988), Naylor uses
alternating narrators who examine, deconstruct,
and redefine the past. Naylor’s fourth novel, Bai-
ley’s Cafe (1992), explores female sexuality, female
sexual identity, and male sexual identity. In 1994
the stage adaptation of Bailey’s Cafe was produced
by Hartford Stage Company. Like The Women of
Brewster Place, The Men of Brewster Place (1998)
presents the experiences on Brewster Place from
the perspective of the men, who struggle to survive
the numerous obstacles they encounter as they at-
tempt to live meaningful lives in a decaying urban
housing project.
Naylor has received several prestigious awards,
fellowships, and honors. She was a writer-in-resi-
dence at Cummington Community of the Arts
(1981) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986).
She was a visiting professor and lecturer at George
Washington University (1981), New York Univer-
sity (1986), Princeton University, (1986), Boston
University (1987), and Brandeis University (1988),
and a senior fellow in the Society for Humani-
ties, Cornell University (1988), Marygrove Col-
lege (1989), the University of Kent in Canterbury,
England (1992), and in India. She also received the
Distinguished Writer Award from the Mid-Atlan-
tic Writers Association (1983), a National Endow-
ment for the Arts Fellowship for her novels (1985),Naylor, Gloria 387