In her landmark book of essays, In Search Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker offers a fascinating way to consider genius:

"We are a people. A people does not throw its geniuses away, And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and if necessary, bone by bone."

From the essay, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan Review."

Walker specifically used the case of Zora Neale Hurston, extraordinary writer and anthropologist who died destitute and was buried in an unmarked grave, as an example of genius. Black genius. Hurston's best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, continues to astound readers some 70 years after it was published with its pre-feminist, self-actualization story of Janie Crawford, a Black woman in the living in the South, searching for herself as a wife/lover in the complicated arms of the community.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Edited by Kheven LaGrone

I was introduced to Walker and Hurston's work as an undergraduate student who constantly grappled with Black genius-what it was, it could be, but most often how black genius, particularly the works of W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson, were used primarily to sponsor uplift race narratives. In the age of Obama, this troubling class-based philosophical narrative, penned mostly by Black male writers, continues to thrive as the end goal de facto of Black people despite the complexity of Black life throughout the Diaspora. Walker's genius is indebted to Hurston's, similar in that it privileges the once silent voices in of Black women in American literature-the diverse and complicated voices of my mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, cousins and friends. To hold in my hands two decades later, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, edited by Kheven LaGrone, speaks of the impact of this work. It was difficult to write a review that would both share the sparkling insights of the book itself, and to also hold it accountable for its of-the-moment philosophical and academic sensibilities. The work is immeasurably useful in parsing the varied philosophical strands of Walker's controversial novel, as well taking hold of the text by examining the harsh criticisms that were burgeoning when the book was published some twenty-five years later.

It was important to me to begin this review by talking about Black genius because Alice Walker is, without a doubt, a genius.

Her creative body of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry has informed and continues to inform a generation of writers who bear witness to racism, sexism and homophobia in their respective communities in their work as novelists, poets, critics and cultural workers. Indeed, who among us can imagine the world without The Color Purple, the book or subsequent film? This canonized text arrived with blazing insights, feeding the undernourished readers of literature who were hungry for a book that had at its center a Black woman.

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Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. A graduate of Bowdoin College and Brown University, Glave traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica, where he studied Jamaican historiography and Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. While in Jamaica, Glave worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG, www.jflag.org). Glave is the author of the collection Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights), which was nominated by the American Library Association for their “Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year” award and by the Quality Paperback Book Club for their Violet Quill/Best New Gay/Lesbian Fiction Award. . The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including an O. Henry Prize for fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Glave was named a “Writer on the Verge” by The Village Voice in 2000. (December 2005)

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Photo of Mr. Glave by Sylvia Plachy