November 13, 2014
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE FEMINIST WIRE CELEBRATES WRITER TONI CADE BAMBARA’S LIFE AND
LEGACY IN AN UPCOMING 75TH BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY FORUM
www.thefeministwire.com
Curators/Editors: Heidi R. Lewis, Ph.D., and Aishah Shahidah Simmons
The Feminist Wire (TFW) will host a ground breaking two-week online forum ~
http://thefeministwire.com ~ in honor of TONI CADE BAMBARA (1939-1995), beginning on
Monday, November 17, 2014.
The forum is the first on-line celebration of Bambara, an award winning internationally acclaimed
Black feminist writer, cultural worker, and organizer. This year marks Bambara’s 75th birthday
anniversary year.
In designing the Forum, TFW’s Associate Editors Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Heidi R. Lewis,
partnered to curate the online Bambara tribute. Simmons, a former Bambara film student in the
1990s and Creator of NO! The Rape Documentary, and Lewis an Assistant Professor at Colorado
College, spent over six months conceptualizing, organizing, and editing the forum, which includes
writers, scholars, poets, filmmakers, activists, and others.
Bambara believed that the role of the writer/artist is “to make revolution irresistible.” She also
believed that the work and responsibility of the artist/cultural worker is determined by the
community that they serve. Contributors to the forum speak to Bambara’s continued influence on
political and social movements.
Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison called her dear friend Bambara, “a
writer’s writer.” In 2013 Bambara was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of
Fame. Additionally, she has received numerous others awards and accolades in her lifetime for her
writing, including 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Bambara’s
written work includes the ground breaking1970 anthology The Black Woman, two short story
collections, Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Seabirds Are Still Alive (1977); and one novel, The
Salt Eaters (1980). Toni Morrison published two of her friend’s work posthumously Deep Sightings
and Rescue Missions (1995), a collection of fiction, essays, and conversations; and, Those Bones Are
Not My Child (1999), a novel about the Atlanta Child Murders.
A noted documentary filmmaker, Bambara also taught, mentored, consulted, worked and/or
partnered with many emerging and veteran documentary and narrative filmmakers. She was also a
film critic who applied her razor sharp Black feminist analysis in her critiques of film. Her cinematic
The Feminist Wire November 13, 2014 Press Release, Re: Toni Cade Bambara Celebration
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work includes the award-winning films, The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W.E.B. DuBois: A
Biography in Four Voices, both of which were produced and directed by Louis Massiah.
The two-week online forum will offer Love Notes Essays, Remembrances, Poetry, and Videos in
honor of Bambara. Lewis and Simmons gathered more than forty voices that reflect on Bambara’s
life, work, and living legacy. The contributors include the late Tom Feelings and his oldest son
Kamili Feelings, Pearl Cleage, Eleanor Traylor, members from the ImageWeavers Black and Brown
Women's Media Arts Collective, Haki Madhubuti, Nikky Finney, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks,
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Clyde Taylor, Paula Giddings, Susan J. Ross, Rita Dove, Alice Lovelace,
Laura Whitehorn, Kalamu ya Salaam, Cheryl Clarke, Louis Massiah, and Gloria I. Joseph.
Other contributors include, Linda Janet Holmes who recently published A Joyous Revolt, the first
full-length biography on Bambara; Thabiti Lewis who is the editor of Conversations with Toni Cade
Bambara; E. Ethelbert Miller who is responsible for placing a portrait of Bambara on a stamp
coming out of Ghana; and Malaika Adero, who, in her former role as Vice President/Senior Editor at
Atria Book/Simon & Schuster, published a new edition of Bambara’s The Black Woman: An
Anthology, with a foreword by Eleanor Traylor. Adero is responsible for bringing the out of print
anthology back into print.
Activists, scholars, cultural workers, and others interested in learning more about the life and work
of one of the most significant Black women writers to emerge in the 20th century will want to share
this online forum with those who have yet to learn of Bambara’s brilliance and influence on political
and social movements.
The Feminist Wire, an online peer-reviewed publication, co-founded by Black Feminist
Scholars, Hortense J. Spillers, Ph.D. and Tamura A. Lomax, Ph.D. in January 2011, celebrates a
multiplicity of feminist expressions from diverse a writers that span genders, sexualities, professions,
ages, races and ethnicities.
http://TheFeministWire.com