 |
|
| Shay Youngblood (photo: Carolyn Miller) |
|
Shay Youngblood, whose work as a playwright, novelist and short story writer earned her the Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and several NAACP Theater Awards, died June 11, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. She was 64.
"She could and would do anything that her artistic spirit told her to do. Shave your head? Shave your head! She wanted everyone to be free in the way they lived and the way they loved," said author Tayari Jones.
Writer Kelley Alexander observed: "When we would go out to dinner, she would order everything on the menu because she wanted to taste everything and wanted you to taste it."
Youngblood was raised by a community of Black women that included grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-aunts, a pastor's wife, and local shopkeepers. She "turned that early circle of caregivers into her first collection of short stories, Big Mama Stories, which she adapted into her first play, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, in 1988. She adapted the source material again in 2022 into the children's book Mama's Home," the Journal-Constitution wrote.
"It wasn't fiction. It was the truth-telling that fiction can do," her longtime friend Linda Bryant, co-founder of Charis Books & More, Decatur, Ga., said of Big Mama Stories.
A tribute posted on Charis Books & More's Facebook page noted: "In the days since Shay has gone from this Earth, our Charis community has been longing for her to come back, and has sought sustenance in her words and in the words of all those whose lives she touched.
"Shay was an epicurean of the heart, a writer's writer, a generous gifter, a marvelous cook, a cheerleader for everyone's wildest dreams. We are fortunate that we got to witness and celebrate the entire trajectory of her writing career; from her first pre-publication poetry reading at Charis in 1980 to her 2023 picture book release, A Family Prayer."
Bryant also shared the memory of a then 20-year-old Youngblood hanging around Charis: "Once they got to know each other a bit Linda asked Shay what she wanted to do in her life and she said she was writing poems. Before long, Linda convinced her to do a reading of her poems called 'Ticket to Paris.' Shay was terrified, but excited. When the day of the reading came, she called the store and told Linda she was not feeling well and tried to back out. Linda said, 'Well that's too bad because the store is filling up with people excited to hear your words so if you think you can make it, you need to come on down here.' And so she did and her career as a public writer was born."
During the 1980s, Youngblood worked occasionally at Charis "and always knew she could travel and have a job to come home to and a place to crash if needed (at Linda's house). That freedom allowed her to explore herself as a young writer and she often lamented how hard it is for young people today to live the kind of free life she lived when she was young," the bookstore noted.
Youngblood's works also include the novels Soul Kiss (1997) and Black Girl in Paris (2000) as well as the plays Talking Bones, Amazing Grace, and most recently, Square Blues.
Noting that Youngblood did more living than most people do in twice the years, Charis wrote that Soul Kiss ends "with a narrator who is not all the way grown, but who has done a lot of living in a short period of time. The last line of the novel is a kind of grace, for the narrator, for us, for Shay: 'My thirst is endless, the well has no bottom, but there is love all around me, I am sure of it now.' "