Gloria Naylor is an African American

African American

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist and educator.

Early life

Born in New York, she was the first child to Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. As Naylor grew up, her father was a transit worker and her mother was a telephone operator. When Naylor was young, her mother encouraged her to read and keep a journal. Even though her mother had little education, she loved to read and often worked overtime in the fields as a sharecropper to produce enough money to join a book club.

In 1963 she moved to Queens

Queens

Queens is the easternmost of the five boroughs of New York City. The largest borough in area and the second-largest in population, it is coextensive with Queens County, an administrative division of New York state, in the United States....

 with her family. Five years later Naylor followed in her mother's footsteps and became a Jehovah's Witness

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...

, but she left seven years later as ”things weren't getting better, but worse.”

Education

Naylor earned her bachelor’s degree in English

English major

The English Major is a term in the United States and a few other countries for an undergraduate university degree focused around the consumption, analysis, and production of texts in the English language...

 at Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...

, after which she obtained a master’s degree in Afro–American Studies

African American studies

African American studies is a subset of Black studies or Africana studies. It is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of African Americans...

 from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

.

Career

Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place

The Women of Brewster Place (novel)

The Women of Brewster Place, is the first novel by American author Gloria Naylor. It was adapted into the 1989 miniseries The Women of Brewster Place and the 1990 ongoing series Brewster Place by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions; it won the National Book Award in 1983...

was first published in 1982. It was adapted into a 1989 film

1989 in film

-Events:* Batman is released on June 23, and goes on to gross over $410 million worldwide.* Actress Kim Basinger and her brother Mick purchase Braselton, Georgia, for $20 million...

  of the same name

The Women of Brewster Place (1989 television)

The Women of Brewster Place is a TV miniseries that aired on March 19,1989 & March 20,1989 on ABC. The miniseries is based upon the 1982 novel by Gloria Naylor. It was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions with a teleplay by Karen Hall...

 by Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...

's Harpo Productions

Harpo Productions

Harpo Productions, Inc. is an incorporated US-based multimedia production company founded by Oprah Winfrey . It also includes Harpo Films & Harpo Radio, Inc....

.

During her career as a professor, she taught writing and literature at several universities. She has taught at George Washington University

George Washington University

The George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...

, New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

, and Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Works

• The Women of Brewster Place (1982), ISBN 0-7868-6421-4; winner of the National Book Award
  National Book Award
  The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
  
   in 1983
• Linden Hills (1985), ISBN 0-14008-829-6
• Mama Day (1988), ISBN 0-89919-716-7
• Bailey's Café (1992), ISBN 0-15-110450-6
• Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995), ISBN 0-316-59926-3 (editor)
• The Men of Brewster Place (1999), ISBN 0-78688-405-3
• 1996 (2005), ISBN 0-88378-263-4

See also

• Prahlad, Sw. Anand. 1998. "All chickens come home to roost: The function of proverbs in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day." Proverbium 15: 265-282.

Drieling Claudia, 2011. Constructs of "Home" in Gloria Naylor's Quartet. ISBN 978-3-8260-4492-2, 325 pp., by Königshausen & Neumann, Germany, Würzburg.

External links

• Biography at aalbc.com
• Gloria Naylor at aaregistry.com
• Gloria Naylor at Watchtower
  The Watchtower
  The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah's Kingdom is an illustrated religious magazine, published semi-monthly in 194 languages by Jehovah's Witnesses via the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania and printed in various branch offices around the world...
  
   Information Service
• Author profile at her publisher Random House
  Random House
  Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
  
  
• Article "Award Winning Author Gloria Naylor Donates Archives to SHU" at sacredheart.edu