Coleman, Wanda 1946-

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Coleman, Wanda 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born November 13, 1946, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of George (in advertising) and Lewana (a seamstress and domestic worker) Evans; married and divorced twice before she married Austin Straus (poet); children: Anthony, Tunisia, Ian Wayne Grant.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Writer and performer. Worked as production editor, proofreader, magazine editor, waitress, and assistant recruiter for Peace Corps/Vista, 1968-75; staff writer for Days of Our Lives, National Broadcasting Co. (NBC-TV), 1975-76; medical transcriber and insurance billing clerk, 1979-84. Writer in residence at Studio Watts, 1968-69; cohost of interview program for Pacific Radio, 1981—.

MEMBER:

PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named to Open Door Program Hall of Fame, 1975; Emmy Award, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, best writing in a daytime drama, 1976, for Days of Our Lives; fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, 1981-82, and Guggenheim Foundation, 1984; Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets, 1999, for Bathwater Wine; finalist for National Book Award for poetry, 2001, for Mercurochrome: New Poems.

WRITINGS:

Art in the Court of the Blue Fag (chapbook), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1977.

Mad Dog Black Lady, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1979.

Imagoes, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1983, reissued, 1991.

A War of Eyes and Other Stories, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1988.

(Editor) Women for All Seasons: Poetry and Prose about the Transitions in Women's Lives, Woman's Building (Los Angeles, CA), 1988.

Dicksboro Hotel & Other Travels, Ambrosia Press (Tarzana, CA), 1989.

(Editor) Susannah Foster, Earthbound in Betty Grable's Shoes, Chiron Review Press (St. Johns, KS), 1990.

African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1990.

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1991.

Hand Dance, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1993.

Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1996.

Bathwater Wine, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1998.

Mambo Hips and Make Believe: A Novel, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1999.

Mercurochrome: New Poems, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 2001.

Ostinato Vamps: Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2003.

The Riot inside Me: More Trials & Tremors, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 2004.

Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales: New Stories, Black Sparrow Books (Jaffrey, NH), 2007.

Also author of "The Time Is Now" episode, The Name of the Game, NBC-TV, 1970. Wrote text of 24 Hours in the Life of Los Angeles with Jeff Spurrier. Contributor to periodicals, including An Afro American and African Journal of Arts and Letters.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet and short story writer Wanda Coleman is a blatantly political artist who has won much critical acclaim for her work but who has often struggled to make a living from her craft. With eight books of collected writings published by the small Black Sparrow Press by 1998, as well as numerous other publications, she has created a body of work that is first of all focused on racism and that, secondly, ponders the "outcast" status of poor blacks living in Los Angeles. Thus her stories and poems are often angry and treat unhappy, hateful, and violent themes. Her subjects and tone are most likely what separate her from the publish- ing mainstream. But if such things are avoided by the average reader and, arguably, by other, more successful African American writers, many critics have found a wealth of insight and fine writing skills in Coleman's work.

Writing in Black American Literature Forum, Tony Magistrale summarized: "Coleman frequently writes to illuminate the lives of the underclass and the disenfranchised, the invisible men and woman who populate America's downtown streets after dark, the asylums and waystations, the inner city hospitals and clinics…. Wanda Coleman, like Gwendolyn Brooks before her, has much to tell us about what it is like to be a poor black woman in America." Praise has also come from reviewers in a number of prominent magazines. Tamar Lehrich wrote in the Nation: "Wanda Coleman consistently confronts her readers with images, ideas and language that threaten to offend or at least to excite." Lehrich concluded that "Wanda Coleman's poetry and prose have been inspired by her frustration and anger at her position as a black woman and by her desire to translate those feelings into action."

Coleman loved books as a child and published her first poems in a local newspaper at age thirteen. However, she never enjoyed school and considered it "dehumanizing," according to Kathleen K. O'Mara in American Short-Story Writers Since World War II. Coleman attended several colleges but has never earned a degree. Married and the mother of two children by age twenty, she worked many different kinds of jobs during the 1970s and 1980s. By 1969 she had divorced her first husband and conceived of becoming a professional writer, but was forced to turn her energies to more pragmatic concerns. After a brief stint on welfare, she supported her family by waiting tables and typing, among other jobs. In part, the difficulty of finding time to write while working other jobs led Coleman to concentrate on writing poems.

The writer published her first short story, "Watching the Sunset," in Negro Digest in 1970. During the 1970s Coleman experimented in theater, dance, television, and journalism. She won an Emmy for her work as a writer for the television soap opera Days of Our Lives during 1975-76. But Coleman's passion for non-commercial writing was undiminished. Her interest in poetry was deepened by the opportunity to make dramatic public performances. As she participated in the Los Angeles poetry scene, Coleman was influenced by poets Diane Wakoski, John Thomas, Clayton Eshleman, and Charles Bukowski, and mentored by Black Sparrow Press publisher "Papa" John Martin. Her first poetry manuscript was published as the chapbook Art in the Court of the Blue Fag in 1977.

Within a few years, Coleman's work gained her attention from outside of the local literary circle. Mad Dog Black Lady (1979) and Imagoes (1983) earned her a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1981-82) and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry (1984). In 1987 the author published her first collection to include short stories as well as poetry, Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories. According to O'Mara, the book received "mixed reviews" with the "negative criticism centered on the poems and stories as overpoweringly grim and inadequately edited." An all-fiction volume published the next year, A War of Eyes and Other Stories (1988), fared better and strengthened a surge of critical attention and praise focused on Coleman during the 1980s.

The collection of autobiographical stories and prose poems titled African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems came out in 1990, including "Where the Sun Don't Shine," which won the 1990 Harriette Simpson Arnow Prize for fiction. Following this publication, O'Mara summarized: "What little negative criticism she has drawn has focused on her fragmentary vignettes as sketches that leave the reader wanting more, or her violence-laden plots as sometimes too predictable. Her finest skill is making human pain poetically concrete and devising dialogue that allows the reader under the skin of ‘the other.’"

A 1996 book of essays and articles entitled Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors offered readers a selection of nonfiction by Coleman; the writings had been first published over a thirty-year span and were now modified for republication. Like Coleman's fiction, they were mostly based on personal experience in Los Angeles. A Publishers Weekly reviewer explained: "She gives us L.A. as a microcosm of what America is today and where it is heading. The picture is not always hopeful." The reviewer also noted the author's "wry sense of humor" and called some of her ideas "Swiftian" for their gruesomely humorous bent. The book was described by Janice E. Braun in Library Journal as a "nonlinear memoir"; Braun concluded "Whether one identifies with Coleman or objects to her views, the writing is positively outstanding." The 1998 poetry collection Bathwater Wine returned Coleman's readers to a more familiar form. It was described by Publishers Weekly as a "large somewhat sprawling, formally diverse yet occasionally loose, book of poetry."

Bathwater Wine, further commented the Publishers Weekly reviewer, is "an encyclopedic, moment-by-moment accounting of left coast rage, witness and transcendence. The poems move agilely from a tragic (yet comedic) resignation, to verbal riffs and hijinks." "Coleman's sure grasp of an impressive range of poetic strategies, styles, and registers, combined with the sharpness and sensitivity of her vision, makes her something of an odd bird on the American poetic landscape," Graham MacPhee wrote in the African American Review. "Despite being formally complex and experimental, her poetry is less interested in displaying its avant-garde credentials than in tracing the linguistic contours and texture of a realm of experience largely absent from ‘official’ American public discourse."

"There is no lack of heart in Wanda Coleman's latest book," entitled Mercurochrome: New Poems, declared Gregory A. Pardlo, writing for Black Issues Book Review. "The title alludes to the healing powers of her craft." But the poems in Coleman's National Book Award-nominated collection evoke more than just healing. "Justice, as an answer to American racial and sexual politics, has been the theme of Coleman's oeuvre, with the most accessible of her poems describing the insults and injustices which African Americans face daily," explained Eric A. Weil in the African American Review. "Poems of sex and relationships and parenting and the imagination and work and death infuse this volume with the variety of a delicatessen." "With a formidable collection of work already behind her," concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "Coleman's emotional depth and battered, unwavering search for private and public levels of justice continues to expand."

With Ostinato Vamps: Poems, stated Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal, "Coleman continues to prove herself one of the more innovative poets writing today." "In language reminiscent of other linguistic masters, such as Toni Morrison, nothing is extraneous in Coleman's poetry; each line or phrase is packed with words, ideas, and images that force the reader to pay close attention to every ‘moment’ and to value every syllable," declared Sara Kosiba, writing for the African American Review. "Where her poetry comments on contemporary issues, Coleman is ever hopeful. This poetry collection speaks to all students of life on the roles we should play as individuals and in harmony with each other."

In Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales: New Stories, "Coleman offers a set of searching, reflective voices," a Publishers Weekly reviewer opined, "moving from mellifluous to dramatically blunt." "Her searing prose," declared Travis Fristoe, writing for Library Journal, "carries both the luminous allure of a late-night moon and the limned reflection of a high-noon sun." As in her poetry, the author depicts the lives of ordinary African American men and women from the middle of the twentieth century caught up in the drama of life in Los Angeles. "Lauded as a Los Angeles performance poet, Coleman suffuses her written work with sound and music," wrote Joan Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle. "She also energizes language and shapes characters with idioms such as ‘nut up and numb out.’ Radio and records figure everywhere; songs help narrate lives." "There is something poignant and horrible in realizing that these hobbled lives lived half a century ago, are not all that different from the lives lived by African Americans today," stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor; "in that regard, Coleman makes her point." "Coleman's gift," Frank concluded, "is to invite initiates and veterans alike into the smoky worlds she exposes."

After decades of writing, Coleman remains devoted to the themes of racism and female experience and to Los Angeles. The city has been a vital part of her writings and an important outlet for her poetry readings. "As a poet," she once told CA, "I have gained a reputation, locally, as an electrifying performer/reader, and have appeared at local rock clubs, reading the same poetry that has taken me into classrooms and community centers for over 500 public readings since 1973." Coleman added: "Words seem inadequate in expressing the anger and outrage I feel at the persistent racism that permeates every aspect of black American life. Since words are what I am best at, I concern myself with this as an urban actuality as best I can."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 130: American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1993.

PERIODICALS

African American Review, June 22, 1999, Sandra K. Stanley, review of Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors, p. 371; September 22, 2000, Graham MacPhee, review of Bathwater Wine, p. 554; December 22, 2002, Eric A. Weil, review of Mercurochrome: New Poems, p. 695; March 22, 2005, Sara Kosiba, review of Ostinato Vamps: Poems, p. 247.

Black American Literature Forum, fall, 1989, Tony Magistrale, "Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman's Poetry," pp. 539-554.

Black Issues Book Review, March 1, 2001, Gregory A. Pardlo, review of Mercurochrome, p. 39; November 1, 2004, Duriel E. Harris, review of Ostinato Vamps.

Booklist, May 15, 2005, Janet St. John, review of The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors, p. 1629.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2007, review of Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales: New Stories.

Library Journal, February 1, 1997, Janice E. Braun, review of Native in a Strange Land, p. 97; November 15, 2003, Rochelle Ratner, review of Ostinato Vamps, p. 70; October 15, 2007, Travis Fristoe, review of Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales, p. 60.

Nation, February 20, 1988, Tamar Lehrich, review of Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, pp. 242-243.

Publishers Weekly, March 29, 1993, review of Hand Dance, p. 46; October 28, 1996, review of Native in a Strange Land, p. 73; June 29, 1998, review of Bathwater Wine, p. 54; November 22, 1999, review of Mambo Hips and Make Believe: A Novel, p. 44; June 4, 2001, review of Mercurochrome, p. 76; October 6, 2003, review of Ostinato Vamps, p. 81; August 27, 2007, review of Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales, p. 62.

San Francisco Chronicle, November 23, 2007, Joan Frank, "Review: Wanda Coleman's Smoky ‘Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales.’"