Summary

The epigraph on page v is a quotation from Kathleen Collins spread over five lines, like a poem, and addresses the much greater difficulty of doing good than evil.

The “Foreword” by black American poet, playwright, academic and essayist Elizabeth Alexander follows. Alexander outlines her experience as a graduate student in literature in the 1980s, elaborating on her growing discovery that black women would need to create their own art, literature, and criticism to recount their experiences, rather than hope to find those perspectives in existing works. She lists the productive black women in arts, literature, and cinema at the time. One of these was Kathleen Collin’s “legendary film Losing Ground” (xiii). As that film delves into the interiority of a black female intellectual, Alexander felt an immediate connection to this “dazzlingly familiar” figure (xiii). Turning to the short stories, Alexander...