What is the importance of Paule Marshall in the essay collection, Well Read Black Girl?

"Brown Girl, Brownstones' is a novel by Paule Marshall, a black writer who captured the essence of what it was like to live in a bustling and diverse immigrant community in New York. Zinzi Clemmons, in her essay titled "Two New Yorks," says that Marshall's fictional depiction of this neighborhood and the book's protagonist, Selina Boyce, resemble her and her life in remarkable ways. She finds herself drawn to Marshall's writing even more so now that she is an adult living in a 'new New York,' that is less diverse, more gentrified. Marshall's 'old New York' is preserved in the pages of "Brown Girl, Brownstones" and so lives on even as the landscape its characters inhabited has shifted considerably in the intervening years since its publication.