The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom

A feminist writer and theorist of some repute, Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with the late ""black lesbian mother warrior feminist poet"" Audre Lorde, and was the first woman of color appointed to the Modern Language Association's Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession. Her seminal 1977 essay ""Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,"" which puts forth the notion that a ""Black women's literary tradition"" not only exists, but thrives, fittingly opens this collection of newer and older, still vibrant works, most previously published in often hard-to-find journals or anthologies. Noting that ""it is unnerving to imagine"" what kind of writing she might have produced had she not come out, Smith registers obstacles to her current work on a wide-ranging history of black lesbians and gays in America, citing a recent two-volume encyclopedia (Darlene Clark Hine's Black Women in America) in which there are only six entries under ""Lesbian."" In the final essay of the collection, ""A Rose,"" Smith recalls her friend, the late Lucretia ""Lu"" Medina Diggs, and mourns the loss of her and Lorde, stressing that she will not be deterred from her fight for political awareness and compassion. Smith's writing frequently reaches strident polemicist peaks, but, just as frequently, stretches of sublime prose translate her crystalline intellect to the page, exciting both mind and senses. (Nov.)