Jewelle Gomez is a self-identified "Black", "Native", lesbian feminist poet and playwright. She has published nine books, including three books of poetry, a novel, a play, an essay collection, and two books of collaboration. Gomez is best known...
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Jewelle Gomez is a self-identified "Black", "Native", lesbian feminist poet and playwright. She has published nine books, including three books of poetry, a novel, a play, an essay collection, and two books of collaboration. Gomez is best known for her double Lambda Award winning novel,
The Gilda Stories, and its subsequent theater adaptation,
Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story. Born in 1948, Gomez was raised in a poor, Black neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, by her great-grandmother Grace, to whom she dedicated her first book of poetry,
The Lipstick Papers (1980). The Jewelle Gomez papers include manuscripts, interviews, reviews, articles, speeches, and essays. The collection contains a photocopy of the original self-published book of poetry
The Lipstick Papers, and versions of her play, "Waiting for Giovanni", which is based on James Baldwin's life right before the publication of his second and controversial novel,
Giovanni's Room" in 1956.
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