ABSTRACT
My love affair with books began with reading, not with writing. Long before I ever began to write, books were changing my view of the world, giving me information, and painting pictures of places and ways of being that were way different from the narrow confines of the life I lived within—transforming me. I am where I am today not because I am a writer, but first and foremost because I am a reader. In the biblical Book of Revelations there is a passage which declares “blessed is one that reads.” In the fifties, when I was beginning my life as a reader, it was a struggle to find works by black writers, and so when I found them I read whatever they wrote. Devouring these writers, feeding my soul hunger (the heartbeat of love is recognition), it did not matter how many awesome and wonderful non-black writers were out there. The knowledge that there were black writers out there did not help me to become a writer, but rather to be comfortable with myself as a writer.
