Gloria Naylor Biography | Author of Mama Day

Mama Day Author Biography

Born in 1950, Gloria Naylor was raised in New York by working-class parents. Her mother encouraged her to write when she began to exhibit creative ability at the age of seven. But when she graduated from high school, instead of attending college, as her parents wished, she became a Jehovah's Witness, traveling through New York and the South from 1968 to 1975. After she returned to New York, she earned her degree in English from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1981.

It was in college that she first learned about the rich tradition of African-American literature. She told Allison Gloch in 1993, "I was 27 years old before I knew Black women even wrote books." Her reading of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and others, inspired her to begin writing herself. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, chronicled the lives of seven...
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