Echo Brown, "a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality," died September 16, the New York Times reported. She was 39. Brown grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College. She had no professional stage experience when her autobiographical, serio-comic show, Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters, made its debut in 2015.
"It's very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it," she told the Oakland Tribune in 2015. "It's as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed."
Author Alice Walker wrote on her blog in 2016: "What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer's narrative."
When Black Virgins was mentioned in a profile of Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, contacted Brown.
"I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience," Anderson said. "She wasn't familiar with young adult or children's literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be."
The result was the novel Black Girl Unlimited (2020), a novel told through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family's cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother's incarceration, sexual assault, and her mother's overdose.
Brown's second book, The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey (2022), was "a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus," the Times wrote.
Brown moved to Oakland in 2011 and was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers. Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.
"I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor," she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. "That's where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, 'Where can I go to tell more stories?' "
She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. "It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer," he said. "There was something miraculous about her."
Brown's latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer, and director Tyler Perry on a novel, A Jazzman's Blues, based on a 2022 Netflix film Perry directed from a script he wrote in 1995. It is scheduled to be published early next year.