Ann Allen Shockley (b. 1927)
Biography
Ann Allen Shockley was born in Louisville, KY, on June 21, 1927. Shockley began her writing career when she edited her high school newspaper, and wrote for the Louisville Defender and the Fisk Herald all before the age of 21. She earned her B.A. from Fisk University in Tennessee in 1948, where she continued to live and work as a librarian, professor, and archivist, and in 1949 Allen began writing a weekly column for the Federalsburg Times in Maryland entitled "Ebony Topics," and wrote another, similar column for the Bridgeville News in Delaware. In 1959, she received her M.S.L.S. from Western Reserve (Case Western Reserve). Shockley is known forher examination of the lives of African Americans, the lives of African American librarians and what their goals should be, and homosexual and interracial relationships, which was a radical choice when she first started writing about homosexuality in 1974 with her novel Loving Her. Shockley has worked as a curator for the African American Collections at Delaware State College (1959-1960), the University of Maryland (1960-1969), and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she currently works.
Bibliography
Fiction
- Not to Be Alone (unpublished, 1950)
- A World of Lonely Strangers (unpublished 1960)
- Loving Her (1974)
- Say Jesus and Come to Me (1982)
- Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (contributor, 1983)
Non-Fiction
- A History of the Public Library Services to Negroes in the South, 1900-1955 (1960)
- Does the Negro College Need a Special Negro Collection? (1961)
- A Handbook for the Administration of Special Black Collections (1970)
- Tell It Like It Is: A Criterion for Children's Books in Black and White (1970)
- Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity (1972)
- Living Black American Authors: A Biographical Directory (editor, with Sue P. Chandler,
1973)
- American Anti-Slavery Literature: An Overview-1693-1859 (1974)
- The New Black Feminists (1974)
- Black Publishers and Black Librarians: A Necessary Union (1975)
- Handbook of Black Librarianship (editor, with E. J. Josey, 1977)
- The Black Lesbian in American Literature (1979)
- Black Lesbian Biography: Lifting the Veil (1982)
- On Lesbian/Feminist Book Reviewing (1984)
- Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (editor,
1988)
Short Fiction
- The Picture Prize (1962)
- A Far Off Sound (1963)
- The Funeral (1967)
- The President (1970)
- Crying for Her Man (1971)
- Her Own Thing (1972)
- Ah: The Young Black Poet (1974)
- The More Things Change (1977)
- A Case of Telemania (1978)
- The Black and White of It (1980)
- The World of Rosie Polk (1987)
Sources and Links
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