Mary Helen Washington with Martha Jones: PAULE MARSHALL: A WRITER'S LIFE

The works of Paule Marshall, including the beloved Brown Girl, Brownstones, are now understood as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature—a bridge between Harlem Renaissance writers and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Yet Paule Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked.

In Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life, to be published February 10, 2026, by Yale/Black Lives, Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers—including Marshall’s unpublished memoir—to give us the fullest account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.

Join the author, along with historian Martha Jones, at The Ivy on Tuesday, February 17th for a conversation about this exciting new volume.

Preorder PAULE MARSHALL: A WRITER'S LIFE here!

Mary Helen Washington is distinguished university professor emerita in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of the prizewinning The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Martha Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of five books, most recently The Trouble of Color, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications.

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