The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s StudiesAt one point or another, we all ended up living in Thulani’s house in Fort Greene. We crashed, for a week or a couple of months, until we got (back) on our feet or figured ourselves out. People called us “Thulani’s girls,” as though we were the children she never herself bore. And certainly, after we graduated from college and moved to New York City to pursue our dreams of journalism, dance, theatre, as well as the more mundane aspects of making a living and finding love, Thulani was our model and our inspiration. Having grown up in the segregated south and been part of the anti-war and black power demonstrations at Columbia University as an undergraduate at Barnard in 1968, Thulani moved to San Francisco to become a journalist. There, she was part of the original collective that spearheaded the development of innovative theatrical events like Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. After moving to New York City, Thulani went on to become a celebrated novelist, librettist, poet, screenwriter, and playwright, and she was the first black staff writer and senior editor at the Village Voice. Thulani was the black Renaissance woman we all wanted to be, crossing artistic and scholarly genres with ease while maintaining her group of friends and family close, showing us how to work hard, play hard, and love hard, always encouraging our dreams and never letting on how tiresome we must have sounded when we imagined we were the first to experience this or that slight, or to have come up with this or that creative insight. In her non-judgmental way, Thulani showed us how to be ourselves, and how to carry community with us while doing so.
