A Few Awesome Women in Honor of Black History Month

Happy Wednesday! I've been really uninspired to blog this last week - it may have something to do with my work period being 13 days (February 16-28) instead of the usual 15-16 days. Time crunch? Yeah, just a little bit.

I still had time to finish reading Carrie's Story and interview Molly Weatherfield. As part of the book tour, I'll be sharing the interview and my review on April 4th.

This is just a small sample of the women of African descent I admire. I could keep going but the post would quickly get too long.

The poet Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Even if you don't read poetry, you may remember it from its adaptation into a Tyler Perry movie with an ensemble cast including Thandie Newton, Janet Jackson and Kerry Washington.



Lucille Baldwin Brown is an everyday woman who blazed a trail (with an extraordinary sense of style!) - she was the first Black public librarian in Tallahassee, Florida.



Author Alice Walker.



Sojourner Truth. (It's a little hard to read here, buy easier to see on Pinterest.)



Josephine Baker - the singer/dancer/actor/civil rights activist was also an Allied spy during World War II!



Rosa Parks - there's so much more to her story than the time she refused to give up her seat on the bus. She was a lifelong civil rights activist who also worked to bring more attention to the issue of violence against women. When she passed away, she was the first woman to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda and only the second African-American. With Sojourner Truth, she's soon to be one of two African-American women honored with a statue in the Capitol.



Raina Lamont, age 3, wore her Captain America costume to the polling place during last year's election.



Music and style icons Grace Jones and Tina Turner hung out together in 1981.



Going back one more generation, here's Billie Holiday hanging out with Ella Fitzgerald.



Finally, our strong (and beautiful) First Lady of the United States, Ms. Michelle Obama. Whether you agree with her husband's politics or not, you must admit wherever she goes and represents American women, she makes a good impression.

Audiobook at Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/919398501/Josephine-Baker-in-Berlin

Audiobook at Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/josephine-baker-in-berlin-1?sId=bbcce908-210e-4557-8179-79b7234cf528&ssId=frYh4xBx4uHpTEfoAAVY4&cPos=1

WIP Wednesday ~ An Exciting Day for Shah Wharton

Today is an exciting day for my fellow author/blogger Shah Wharton; today she reveals the cover of her first novel, Finding Esta! Shah will be my guest next WIP Wednesday, but in the meantime, you can see her book cover here. Go show my girl Shah some love.

This week I've been working on adding a few more sex scenes to the third novel in the Pagan Spirits series, St. James' Day. But I haven't done a ton of writing this week. What are YOU working on? 

Obviously, I've been reading - lots of From Here to Eternity, and still have 300 pages to go. Then I started Deborah Harkness' Shadow of Night, the sequel to A Discovery of Witches, because I have it from the library for a limited time. Yep, I'm cheating on Robert E. Lee Prewitt with Matthew Clairmont. But it doesn't mean I don't love you, Prew, despite all your faults.

I can't wait to see the From Here to Eternity movie, after I finish the book. I'm stupidly excited that the Internet told me Montgomery Clift was bisexual. I really don't care about people's sexual orientation - just be yourself - yet tell me that somebody famous and hot is bi, and all of the sudden I'm like, "Victory!"

'Sup with that?

Monty Clift, you will be my second future baby daddy once time travel is perfected. After George Gershwin. We'll go in chronological order.

I'm also stupidly excited that someone found this blog by searching "famous Jewish lesbians." I'm happy to be the curator of Jewish lesbian knowledge, although I can't really tell you that much. A little bit about The Dyke and Dybbuk, yes. I can tell you a little more about bisexual Jewish women: Peaches, for example, and Susan Sontag and Rachel Kramer Bussel. I feel compelled to post about Gertrude Stein now.

Or Phranc. Phranc comes up in She's A Rebel by Gillian G. Gaar:

"As virtually the only self-proclaimed 'all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger,' Phranc, with her snappy flattop hairstyle, was a category unto herself, but she was quick to point out it was a category with universal appeal. 'My songs speak to everybody,' she says. 'I have some songs that deal with the issue of lesbians, and there's an identification of me being a lesbian, but my sexuality is not the biggest part of me-it's part of me like my haircut and my shoes; it's not the biggest part of me and it's not the smallest part. But when I was growing up, there were so few examples of people that were out as lesbians, I felt like I was the only one! I'm not the only one. Young people need to know that they're not the only one. They should have the right to grow up and be whoever they are. That's the point I'm making.'

"Born Susie Gottlieb and raised in Los Angeles, Phranc began playing music at age five, progressing from piano to violin to guitar by age ten..."

As I'm writing this, I'm watching For Colored Girls, the film based on Ntozake Shange's play-in-poetry  For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. I've never read Shange, but her words are gorgeous. The movie was adapted and produced by Tyler Perry; the previews at the beginning of the DVD included I Can Do Bad All By Myself, a Tyler Perry project that stars Taraji P. Henson.