Paule Marshall: Bed-Stuy's Poets in the Kitchen

Paule Marshall Photo Credit: AP Photo

A note from our founder

Our thirteenth tribute goes to a writer who found her first literary education at the kitchen table. Paule Marshall grew up listening to her mother and the neighborhood women of Bedford-Stuyvesant trade stories after long days of work, and she spent the rest of her career proving just how much power that language held.

Poets in the Kitchen

Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke on April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of immigrants from Barbados who had arrived during the first great wave of Caribbean migration to the United States. Growing up in a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, she spent her childhood listening to her mother and the neighborhood women talk in the kitchen — women she would later call her first literary influences, the "poets in the kitchen" who wielded language as both weapon and refuge. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1953 and later attended Hunter College.

Brown Girl, Brownstones

Marshall arrived on the literary scene in 1959 with her debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, one of the first American novels to portray the complex inner life, psychological struggle, and cultural identity of a young Black immigrant woman with real depth. Her fiction became known for its rich, rhythmic use of Bajan dialect and for the way it traced the deep structural ties connecting America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

A Life in the Classroom

Marshall was as devoted to teaching as she was to writing. She held the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University and taught at institutions including Virginia Commonwealth University over the course of a decades-long academic career. Her honors included a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Dos Passos Prize. She died in Richmond, Virginia, on August 12, 2019, at the age of 90.

Bibliography

Novels

• Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) — Her timeless, semi-autobiographical masterpiece following Selina Boyce, a fiercely independent girl coming of age in Bed-Stuy, caught between her mother's obsessive drive to buy a Brooklyn brownstone and her father's tragic longing to return to Barbados.

  
  

• The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) — A panoramic, deeply political novel set on a fictional Caribbean island, exploring the heavy legacies of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and the spiritual resistance of a marginalized community confronting a modern American development project.

  
  

• Praisesong for the Widow (1983) — Her celebrated, American Book Award-winning novel tracking Avey Johnson, a wealthy, middle-aged Black widow who abruptly deserts a luxury cruise to embark on a spiritual, ancestral awakening on a small Caribbean island.

  
  

• Daughters (1991) — A complex, multi-layered narrative focusing on Ursa Beatrice Beale, a modern woman navigating her career in New York while constantly balancing her deep personal and political ties to her homeland in the West Indies.

  
  

• The Chosen Place (2001) — A rich, reflective story tracking an African American dancer who travels to her mother's birthplace in the Caribbean, examining the profound healing power of historical memory.

Short Fiction & Memoirs

• Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961) — A collection of four brilliant novellas, each set in a different part of the world (New York, British Guiana, Brazil, and Paris), centering on aging men facing the spiritual emptiness of their lives.

  
  

• Reena and Other Stories (1983) — A crucial collection compiling her early short fiction, essays, and autobiographical pieces tracing her development as a Black woman writer.

  
  

• Triangular Road: A Memoir (2009) — Her elegant, slim memoir reflecting on her four-decade career, detailing her mentorship under Langston Hughes and mapping her personal journeys along the historic slave-trade routes between America, Africa, and the Caribbean.

READ MARSHALL

Start with Brown Girl, Brownstones to meet the Bed-Stuy she grew up in, or Praisesong for the Widow if you'd rather begin with her celebrated, award-winning later work. Either way, you'll hear the same voices that first shaped her — the poets in the kitchen, still speaking through every page. Get the book.

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