This book contains a lively and wide ranging collection of critical essays on Black women's writing from Afro-American, African, South African, British and Caribbean novelists, poets, short story writers and a dramatist. The contributors are black and white, female and male, academics and readers who chart their engagement with and enjoyment of the texts of some of the key figures in black women's writing across several continents.

Preface - Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Black and White: Voices, Writers and Readers; G.Wisker - 'Writing the Body': Reading Joan Riley's The Unbelonging, Grace Nichols' I Is a Long Memoried Woman and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf; G.Griffin - Black Women Writing and Reading; J.Roy - 'Long Memoried Women': Caribbean Women Poets; B.Woodcock - Disremembered and Unaccounted For: Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved and Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar; G.Wisker - Art, Action and the Ancestors: Alice Walker's Meridian in its Context; C.Hall - 'Not My People': Toni Morrison and Identity; E.Jordan - Autobiography: The Art of Self-Definition; E.L.Birch - Reading From a Distance: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy; S.Chetin - Reconstructing the Past, Shaping the Future: Bessie Head and the Question of Feminism in a New South Africa; D.Driver - Index

Gina has worked in educational development for over 25 years, and in 2005 was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for her work in teaching and learning. She is the author of The Undergraduate Research Handbook, The Postgraduate Research Handbook and The Good Supervisor.