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Preface by Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Zeinabu irene Davis, Michelle Parkerson, and Seret Scott.
A landmark collection restoring Black luminary Kathleen Collins’s visionary plays and screenplays to their rightful place in American film and literature.
The writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins was a groundbreaking figure in the Black arts and literary cultures of the 1970s and 1980s, yet her work has only recently begun receiving the mainstream recognition it deserves. For the first time, Women, Sisters and Friends shares the plays and screenplays that were central to Collins’s creative practice, which illuminated Black women’s lives, artistic ambitions, intimacies, and losses with remarkable emotional depth. These evocative works reveal why Collins inspired contemporaries such as Toni Morrison and Julie Dash and paved the way for generations of Black feminist creators.
Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, this richly illustrated volume pairs Collins’s scripts with contextual essays, archival materials, and reflections from family members, collaborators, and fellow artists. Arriving amid a major revival of Collins’s work—with acclaimed volumes of her fiction, national film screenings, new stage productions, and renewed popular interest—Women, Sisters and Friends is both an essential act of restorative history and a vital contribution to American culture.
Kathleen Collins (1942–1988) was a playwright and filmmaker best known for her film Losing Ground. Since her untimely death at the age of forty-six, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, has published two posthumous collections of her writing: Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary.
Samantha N. Sheppard is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, author and coeditor of four books, and Academy Film Scholar recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Hayley O’Malley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Program in Media Studies at Rice University and is completing her first book, Dreams of a Black Cinema.
Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University, author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen, and coeditor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film.
Contents
Glossary vii
The Kitchen Table: A Preface
Ayoka Chenzira, Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Michelle Parkerson, and Seret Scott, edited by Samantha N. Sheppard
Introduction: Kathleen Collins, a Writer at Work
Alix Beeston, Hayley O’Malley, and Samantha N. Sheppard
1. Women, Sisters and Friends (1971)
Screenplay introduced by Alix Beeston
2. Lila (1974)
Screenplay introduced by Hayley O’Malley
3. In the Midnight Hour: A Play in Three Acts (1978)
Play introduced by Hayley O’Malley
4. Almost Music: A Cabaret Play (1980)
Play introduced by Alix Beeston
5. Only the Sky is Free: A Fictional Meditation on Bessie Coleman (1985)
Screenplay introduced by Hayley O’Malley
6. Madame Flor . . . (1987)
Screenplay introduced by Alix Beeston
7. Looking for Jane: A Play in Three Acts (1988)
Play introduced by Hayley O’Malley
8. Conversations with Julie: A Comedy for the Screen (1988)
Screenplay introduced by Alix Beeston
Inheriting All the Love I Could Handle: A Postscript
Samantha N. Sheppard
Acknowledgments