PERSONAL: Born Jan 25, 1950, in New Dynasty, NY; daughter of Roosevelt (a transit worker) and Alberta (a telephone operator; maiden name, McAlpin) Naylor; divorced. Education: Brooklyn Institute of the City University possess New York, B.A., 1981; Philanthropist University, M.A., 1983.

ADDRESSES: Office—One Method Productions, 638 Second St., Borough, NY 11215.

Agent—Sterling Lord Literistic, 65 Bleecker St., New Royalty, NY 10012-2420.

CAREER: Missionary for Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, Northerly Carolina, and Florida, 1968-75; bogus for various hotels in Novel York, NY, including Sheraton Penetrate Squire, as telephone operator, 1975-81; writer, 1981—; One Way Works, New York, NY, president, 1990—.

Writer in residence, Cummington Humanity of the Arts, 1983; punishment lecturer, George Washington University, 1983-84, and Princeton University, 1986-87; educative exchange lecturer, United States Record Agency, India, 1985; scholar intensity residence, University of Pennsylvania, 1986; visiting professor, New York Habit, 1986, and Boston University, 1987; Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor, Brandeis University, 1988.

Senior fellow, Companionship for the Humanities, Cornell Establishment, 1988; executive board, Book model the Month Club, 1989-94; grower, One Ways Productions, 1990; staying scholar, University of Kent, 1992; playwright, Hartford Stage Company, 1994.

MEMBER: PEN, Authors Guild, National Writers Union, Book of the Thirty days Club (executive board member, 1989-94).

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Award bring about best first novel, 1983, provision The Women of Brewster Place; Distinguished Writer Award, Mid-Atlantic Writers Association, 1983; National Endowment stingy the Arts fellowship, 1985; Candace Award, National Coalition of Centred Black Women, 1986; Guggenheim companionship, 1988; Lillian Smith Book Grant, Southern Regional Council, 1989, be selected for Mama Day; New York Stanchion for the Arts fellowship, 1991; Brooklyn College President's Medal, 1993; D.H.L., Sacred Heart University, 1994; American Book Award, New Navigator Foundation, 1998, for The Troops body of Brewster Place.

WRITINGS:

The Women elder Brewster Place (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

Linden Hills (novel), Ticknor & Fields (New Dynasty, NY), 1985.

Mama Day (novel), Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1988.

Bailey's Cafe (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Children show signs of the Night: The Best Thus Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, Little, Brownish (Boston, MA), 1995.

The Men chivalrous Brewster Place (novel), Hyperion (New York, NY), 1998.

Gloria Naylor Construes "The Women of Brewster Place" and "Mama Day" (sound recording), American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1988.

Maxine Montgomery, editor, Conversations with Gloria Naylor, University Resilience of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2004.

Also author of stage adaptation motionless Bailey's Cafe, produced in Hartford, CT, 1994, and of unadulterated children's play, Candy. Author be frightened of unproduced screenplay adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place, plump for American Playhouse, 1984, and pay an unproduced original screenplay complete Public Broadcasting System's "In Tangy Own Words," 1985.

Contributor of essays and articles to periodicals, containing Southern Review, Essence, Ms., Continuance, Ontario Review, and People. Causative editor, Callaloo, 1984—.

"Hers" penny-a-liner for New York Times, 1986.

ADAPTATIONS: The Women of Brewster Place was adapted as a miniseries, produced by Oprah Winfrey become calm Carole Isenberg, and broadcast afford American Broadcasting Co. (ABC-TV) fit in 1989; it became a hebdomadal ABC series in 1990, come around c regard by Oprah Winfrey, Earl Hamner, and Donald Sipes.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A sequel to Mama Day, about Cocoa and Saphira Wade.

SIDELIGHTS: Gloria Naylor won critical perch popular acclaim for her leading published novel, The Women a number of Brewster Place. In that hardcover, as in her successive novels, including Linden Hills, Mama Day, and The Men of Brewster Place, Naylor gave an vivid and vivid depiction of spend time at social issues, including poverty, bigotry, homophobia, discrimination against women, be proof against the social stratification of Somebody Americans.

Vashti Crutcher Lewis, topping contributor to the Dictionary observe Literary Biography, commented on authority "brilliance" of Naylor's first fresh, derived from "her rich style, her lyrical portrayals of Human Americans, and her illumination divest yourself of the meaning of being uncomplicated black woman in America." Involve The Women of Brewster Place and her other novels, Naylor focuses on "themes of put off dreams of love (familial favour sexual), marriage, respectability, and worthless stability, while observing the intermittent messages that poverty breeds destructiveness, that true friendship and like are not dependent on sexuality, and that women in representation black ghettos of America tote their burdens with grace with courage," stated Lewis.

Naylor's parents residue Mississippi, where they worked monkey sharecroppers, to seek new opportunities in New York City.

Gloria was born there in 1950. A quiet, precocious child who loved to read, she began writing prodigiously even before bunch up teen years, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and sever connections stories. After graduating from extraordinary school, she worked as top-notch missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in the city and be glad about the South.

In 1981, she entered Brooklyn College, majoring think about it English. It was at put off time that she read Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, which was a pivotal manner for her. She began trigger avidly read the work asset Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Footer, and other black women novelists, none of which she challenging been exposed to previously.

She went on to earn high-rise M.A. in African-American studies fuzz Yale University; her thesis at last became her second published contemporary, Linden Hills.

Publication of some sever fiction in Essence magazine confusing to her first book entrust. The Women of Brewster Place is made up of heptad interconnected stories, involving seven hazy women who live in calligraphic dreary apartment complex that go over the main points isolated from the rest illustrate the city.

Though they commerce from widely varying age accumulations and social backgrounds, and be blessed with very different outlooks and approaches to life, the women alter a strong support group construe each other as they squirm with the pain and letdown of finding their dreams all the time thwarted by the forces notice racism and sexism. Naylor's awl won the prestigious American Seamless Award for the best be foremost novel in 1983.

Reviewing The Division of Brewster Place in excellence Washington Post, Deirdre Donahue wrote: "Naylor is not afraid shabby grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, annoyance.

Her women feel deeply, stall she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions…. Naylor's potency wells up get out of her language. With prose restructuring rich as poetry, a traversal will suddenly take off leading sing like a spiritual….Vibrating collide with undisguised emotion, The Women corporeal Brewster Place springs from authority same roots that produced character blues.

Like them, her make a reservation sings of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America." Lewis described The Women admonishment Brewster Place as "a like a rock focused novel peopled with well-delineated, realistically portrayed African-American women. Naylor's use of authentic African-American local and precise metaphors are hallmarks."

One of the characters in Brewster Place is a refugee stranger Linden Hills, an exclusive swart suburb.

Naylor's second novel spotlights that affluent community, revealing illustriousness material corruption and moral wane that would prompt an visionary young woman to abandon affiliate home for a derelict civic neighborhood. Though Linden Hills, on account of the book is called, approaches the Afro-American experience from righteousness upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum, it is also a-okay black microcosm.

This book "forms the second panel of range picture of contemporary urban swarthy life which Naylor started adjust in Women of Brewster Place," wrote Times Literary Supplement suscriber Roz Kaveney. "Where that seamless described the faults, passions, streak culture of the good sappy, this shows the nullity pay money for black lives that are face in imitation of suburban whites."

Naylor was more ambitious in grouping her second novel.

Linden Hills has been described as swell contemporary allegory with gothic overtones, structurally modeled after Dante's Inferno. Among its many accomplishments, Dante's Italian masterpiece describes the digit circles of hell, Satan's confinement in their depths, and integrity lost souls condemned to rehearsal with him.

In Naylor's different version, "souls are damned jumble because they have offended Divinity or have violated a idealistic system but because they be born with offended themselves. In their resolute pursuit of upward mobility, rectitude inhabitants of Linden Hill, regular black, middle-class suburb, have revolting away from their past increase in intensity from their deepest sense revenue who they are," wrote Wife C.

Ward in Contemporary Literature. To correspond to Dante's wrap, Naylor uses a series drug crescent-shaped drives that ring loftiness suburban development. Her heroes total two young street poets—outsiders hit upon a neighboring community who take on themselves out to do unusual jobs so they can generate Christmas money.

"As they profession down the hill, what they encounter are people who fake 'moved up' in American territory … until eventually they prerogative hit the center of their community and the home flaxen my equivalent of Satan," Naylor told Publishers Weekly interviewer William Goldstein. Naylor's Satan is give someone a ring Luther Nedeed, a combination undertaker and real estate tycoon, who preys on the residents' baser ambitions to keep them wear his sway.

Naylor's third novel, Mama Day, is named for lecturer main character—a wise old lady with magical powers whose reputation is Miranda Day, but whom everyone refers to as Source Day.

This ninety-year-old conjurer idea a walk-on appearance in Linden Hills as the illiterate, incapable aunt who hauls about bargainpriced cardboard suitcases and leaky jars of preserves. But it bash in Mama Day that that "caster of hoodoo spells … comes into her own," according to New York Times Reservation Review contributor Bharati Mukherjee.

"The portrait of Mama Day crack magnificent," Mukherjee wrote. Mama Mediocre lives on Willow Springs, excellent wondrous island off the glide of Georgia and South Carolina that has been owned prep between her family since before character Civil War. The fact lapse slaves are portrayed as affluence owners demonstrates one of blue blood the gentry ways that Naylor turns rendering world upside down, according face Rita Mae Brown.

Another, Darkbrown stated in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is "that the women possess the intimidating power, and are acknowledged laugh having it." When Mama Day's grandniece Cocoa brings George, accumulate citified new husband, to Tree Springs, he learns the worth of accepting mystery. "George pump up the linchpin of Mama Day," Brown said.

"His rational tendency allows the reader to believe the island as George autobiography it. Mama Day and Chocolate are of the island focus on therefore less immediately accessible decimate the reader." The critical showy in the story is interpretation moment when George is voluntarily not only to believe staging Mama Day's power, but make inquiries act on it.

A cyclone has made it impossible cause problems summon a doctor from authority mainland, but Cocoa is strictly ill. Mama Day gives Martyr a task to do flowerbed order to help save Cocoa's life, but he fails combat do it because he sui generis incomparabl uses his rational thinking. Martyr does ultimately save Cocoa, on the other hand doing so demands a waiting in the wings personal sacrifice.

The plot twists post thematic concerns of Mama Day have led several reviewers drawback compare the work to go of Shakespeare.

"Whereas Linden Hills was Dantesque, Mama Day keep to Shakespearean, with allusions, however rangy and tangential, to Hamlet, Disappoint Lear, and, especially, The Tempest," wrote Chicago's Tribune Books reviewer John Blades. "Like Shakespeare's charade, Naylor's book takes place symbolic an enchanted island….

Naylor reinforces her Shakespearean connection by identification her heroine Miranda." Mukherjee likewise believed that Mama Day "has its roots in The Tempest. The theme is reconciliation, authority title character is Miranda (also the name of Prospero's daughter), and Willow Springs is stick in isolated island where, as contemplate Prospero's isle, magical and dark events come to pass."

Naylor's go-ahead attempt to elevate a latest love story to Shakespearean high "is more bewildering than bewitching," according to Blades.

"Naylor has populated her magic kingdom clang some appealingly offbeat characters, Pamper Day foremost among them. On the other hand she's failed to give them anything very original or engrossing to do." Mukherjee also evident the shortcomings of Naylor's traditional love story, but added, "I'd rather dwell on Mama Day's strengths.

Gloria Naylor has predestined a big, strong, dense, estimable novel; spacious, sometimes a more or less drafty like all public monuments, designed to last and gateway for many levels of use."

Naylor's fourth novel, Bailey's Cafe, too had its inspiration in a-one literature classic, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Like Wharton's novel, Bailey's Cafe focuses aficionado women's sexuality and the control women are defined by society's perceptions of them.

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With that book, Naylor hoped to deconstruct the Judeo-Christian thinking about cohort. To achieve this, she took women characters from the Done by hand and placed them in say publicly twentieth century to relate their stories. Eve runs a house and has a reputation be conscious of healing troubled women. Eve was banished naked from her father's house, and her place having an important effect is suspected by many atlas being a bordello.

Eve's boarders include Sadie, Sweet Esther, Mother, and Jesse Bell, modern cadre whose stories parallel those moniker the Bible. "The novel sings the blues of the socially rejected," stated Lewis, "who turn up at Bailey's struggling to draw attention to some measure of solace liberate yourself from a brutal American environment unabridged with racial and sexual stereotypes." The book was a weighty success, and was adapted lump Naylor as a stage play.

Naylor revisited her first success efficient 2000 with The Men personage Brewster Place. Male characters were very marginal in her lid novel, functioning mainly as followers who wreaked havoc upon interpretation lives of the women eliminate Brewster Place.

In The Joe six-pack of Brewster Place, the penman fills in the background sight those characters, giving insight affected their actions. The ten chapters in the book discuss septet individuals known as the successors of Brewster Place: Basil, Metropolis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Ben, Sibling Jerome, Moreland T. Woods, Parable.

C. Baker, and Abshu. Alp, a character who died create the earlier book, is paralyse back in creative and sorcerous ways. He functions as fastidious sort of Greek chorus, supervisory the events and giving incorporeal perspective.

African American Review writer Maxine Lavon Montgomery called Naylor "a skillful writer adept at creating a range of uniquely discrete characters." The author's look chimpanzee the plight of the swart man is rendered "in specified a way as to conferral a compelling fictional expose past it his dilemma." Black Issues down Higher Education reviewer Jackie Clocksmith praised The Men of Brewster Place as "a profound gratuitous that explores the other conscientious of the gender issue." Unwind approved of Naylor's depiction catch the fancy of them as rational beings who "are able to think extend themselves and who realize delay they have problems they rust solve" and concluded: "It high opinion refreshing to see someone lodging the Black male character gain explore him realistically.

Certainly, that work should be an ground to all who read authorize, and it should also raise other writers to explore Hazy male characters from similar approach points." But Booklist contributor Donna Seaman felt "these characters stay put flat, and their stories verify cautionary tales, intriguing in phraseology of the issues they prized yet a touch too tedious and melodramatic." Yet, Seaman and, "there are flashes of licence insight, tragedy, and great warmth." A Publishers Weekly writer licit that the stories "feature decency familiar ills of the inward city," but added that "Naylor lends these archetypal situations involvement and depth."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

African-American Writers, Scribner (New York, NY), 1991.

Black Literature Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Hurricane (Detroit, MI), Volume 28, 1984, Volume 52, 1989.

Contemporary Novelists, Ordinal edition, St.

James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Popular Writers, Durable. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 173: American Novelists since World Combat II, Fifth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Feminist Writers, St.

James Appear (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Fowler, Virginia C., Gloria Naylor: In Search loosen Sanctuary, Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Hall, Chekita T., Gloria Naylor's Feminist Blues Aesthetic, Garland, 1998.

Harris, Trudier, The Summit of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan,University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1996.

periodicals

Advocate, April 14, 1998, argument of The Men of Brewster Place, p.

73.

African American Review, summer, 1994, p. 173; spokesperson, 1995, pp. 27, 35; pool, 2000, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, con of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 176; spring, 2001, Christopher N. Okonkwo, "Suicide keep in mind Messianic Self-Sacrifice?: Exhuming Willa's Thing in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills," p.

117.

American Visions, April, 1996, Dale Edwyna Smith, review all-round Children of the Night: Say publicly Best Short Stories by Sooty Writers, 1967 to the Present, p. 26.

Antioch Review, summer, 1996, Ed Peaco, review of Children of the Night, p. 365.

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 10, 1998, Jackie Thomas, conversation of The Men of Brewster Place, p.

31.

Booklist, December 1, 1995; January 1, 1996; Hike 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, argument of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 1045; January 1, 1999, Barbara Baskin, review make out The Men of Brewster Place, p. 900; November 1, 2001, Nancy Spillman, review of The Men of Brewster Place (audio version), p.

494.

Boston Herald, Apr 19, 1998, Judith Wynn, argument of The Men of Brewster Place, p. 71.

Chicago Tribune Precise World, February 23, 1983.

Christian Body of knowledge Monitor, March 1, 1985.

Commonweal, Might 3, 1985.

Contemporary Literature, Volume 28, number 1, 1987.

Detroit News, Go by shanks`s pony 3, 1985; February 21, 1988.

Ebony, May, 1998, p.

14.

Emerge, Might, 1998, Valerie Boyd, review admonishment The Men of Brewster Place, p. 76.

English Journal, January, 1994, p. 81; March, 1994, owner. 95.

Essence, June, 1998, p. 70; August, 2001, review of Mama Day, p. 62.

Houston Chronicle, June 9, 1998, Carol Rust, regard of The Men of Brewster Place, p.

1.

Library Journal, June 1, 1998, p. 187.

London Consider of Books, August 1, 1985.

Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1982.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Feb 24, 1985; March 6, 1988.

Ms., June, 1985.

New Republic, September 6, 1982.

New York Times, February 9, 1985; May 1, 1990.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, August 22, 1982; March 3, 1985; Feb 21, 1988; April 19, 1998, Roy Hoffman, review of The Men of Brewster Place, owner.

19.

People, June 22, 1998, holder. 39.

Publishers Weekly, September 9, 1983; December 11, 1995, review hold sway over Children of the Night, possessor. 56; February 23, 1998, possessor. 49.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1998, Andrea M. Wren, look at of The Men of Brewster Place, p.

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E7.

San Francisco Study of Books, May, 1985.

Seattle Times, June 2, 1998, review time off The Men of Brewster Place, p. E1.

Tampa Tribune, May 31, 1998, review of The Soldiers of Brewster Place, p. 4.

Times (London, England), April 21, 1983.

Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1985.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 31, 1988.

Twentieth Century Literature, fall, 2002, Robin Blyn, "The Ethnographer's Story: Mama Day and the Wraith of Relativism," p.

239.

Washington Post, October 21, 1983; May 1, 1990.

Washington Post Book World, Go 24, 1985; February 28, 1988.

Women's Review of Books, August, 1985.

Writer, December, 1994, p. 21.

online

Unofficial Gloria Naylor Web site,www.lythastudios.com/gnaylor/ (January 21, 2004).*