Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings

Black lesbian feminist, essayist, journalist, poet, author, and cultural worker, Anita Cornwell wrote extensively about her experiences as a Black lesbian in the United States during the twentieth century exposing the innerworkings of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, racism, the Jim Crow South, and white supremacy. A scholar of Black Lesbian Studies, Cornwell wrote the first collection of essays by a Black lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America, published by Naiad Press in 1983. These essays chronicle her experiences battling against misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Her writing also attends to love and familial loss. This reprint of Cornwell’s classic essays on being black and lesbian, include a groundbreaking interview that Cornwell did with Audre Lorde. Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writings also includes previous unpublished poetry by Cornwell and features a revelatory introduction by scholar Briona Simone Jones.

Briona Simone Jones is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut and the editor of Mouths of Rain. Anita Cornwell (1923-2023) was a Black lesbian feminist, essayist, journalist, poet, author, and cultural worker. Cornwell studied journalism at Temple University and graduated in 1948. She regularly contributed to both The Ladder and The Negro Digest in the 1950s and was the first Black woman writer to publicly identify as a lesbian in print. Her published work appeared in Philadelphia Tribune, and her poetry and essays were published in Feminist Review, Labyrinth, Azalea: A Magazine by Third-World Lesbians, and BLACK/OUT. Cornwell died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the age of 100.