"The most consistently rewarding of the recent anthologies focusingon Afro-American women's writing... " -- Modern FictionStudies

..". successfully [exposes] the core of Black women'swriting and confidently [places] it within the American literary tradition." --Belles Lettres

Black women have been writing and publishingfiction for more than a century, yet little is known of their literary history, their influence on each other, or the significance of their work to the Americanliterary tradition. All the contributors implicitly address the question of how thisrecovered tradition reshapes our understanding of American literature.