Description

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A New York Times Awesome Ebook of 2018

A revealing portrait of some of the proficient and charismatic, but least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the 20th century.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-4, was once by way of all money owed a pressure of nature. Even though best possible-identified for her paintings A Raisin within the Sun, her brief lifestyles was once stuffed with peculiar reviews and achievements, and she or he had an unflinching dedication to social justice, which introduced her below FBI surveillance whilst she was once slightly in her twenties. At the same time as her shut buddies and contemporaries, like James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley and Nina Simone, had been rightly celebrated, her tale has been dwindled and relegated to at least one paintings—till now. In 2018, Hansberry gets the popularity she merits with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Middle” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

After the good fortune of A Raisin within the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad techniques: difficult President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, aiding African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Despite the fact that she married a person, she recognized as lesbian and, risking censure and the possibility of being outed, joined one of the vital country’s first lesbian companies. Hansberry related to many activists, writers, and musicians, together with Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst others. Looking for Lorraine is a formidable perception into Hansberry’s peculiar lifestyles—a lifestyles that was once tragically lower a long way too brief.

A Black Caucus of the American Library Affiliation Honor Ebook for Nonfiction

A 2019 Pauli Murray Ebook Prize Finalist