"I . . . wanted to be a writer from the time I was twelve or thirteen years old. But whether that was going to be a probable goal for me didn't come up as an issue for me until my college years," novelist Gloria Naylor told interviewer Charles H. Rowell of Callaloo in a 1997 interview. "It was in my college years that I began to learn about [black women] writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. . . . [H]aving those role models around helped me when I began to feel that I could be a writer."

Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which features a cast of seven strong-willed black women, won the American Book Award for best first fiction in 1983. Naylor has continued her exploration of the black female experience in two subsequent novels that remain focused on women, but she has also expanded her fictional realm...