Sisterfire

A powerful collection of original and recent stories and poems by some of today's most notable authors - including Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Alice Walker - and some of literature's newest voices that speak directly to the lives and concerns of African-American women in the nineties. Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Naylor, ntozake shange, and J. California Cooper join fifty-four other women from the African-American literary scene to lend their voices to the concerns, frustrations, joys, and experiences of Black women today. With courage, anger, and passion they confront the social issues of AIDS, crack, violence, abortion, and sexual abuse. They write of the sustaining bonds between women - among mothers, daughters, sisterfriends, lovers - and of the love of men and the absence of men in their lives. It is a celebration of the strength, diversity, and spirit of African-American women in the past, present, and into the future.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.