Celebrated author and playwright Shay Youngblood died of ovarian cancer on June 11 at the home of her friend Kelley Alexander in Peachtree City, Ga. She was 64.
Born Sharon Ellen Youngblood in Columbus, Ga., in 1959, Youngblood penned novels, poetry, children’s books, and plays, creating powerful Southern Black women characters who were unapologetically self-possessed and free in ways not typically seen in women characters in general, and Black women in particular, in the U.S.
Following the death of her mother when she was 2 years old, Youngblood was raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother. Youngblood credited her upbringing by her grandmothers and their tight-knit circle of friends for shaping and molding her worldview on relationships, society, power, and identity; they and a group of their friends influenced the characters she wrote. Shay also mirrored the close-knit community she grew up in by becoming part of a circle of Black women writers in Atlanta.
“Shay, along with Valerie Boyd and Tina McElroy Ansa, formed a tight-knit group of Black women writers here in Atlanta, and they were very generous,” said Rosalind Bentley, deputy editor at Southern Foodways Alliance and professor of practice at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Georgia. “All of them shared of themselves freely. There was this thinking that there is enough out there for everyone to succeed, and there is room for everyone to be able to tell a story and for Black women to be those storytellers.”
In 1989, Youngblood published her first book, The Big Mama Stories, which she adapted into the seminal play Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, first produced in 1988 by Atlanta’s Horizon Theater, prior to the release of the novel. The play was staged all over the world. Sidney Poitier optioned it to be made into a movie, and Youngblood used that money to obtain a master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University in 1993.
“Shay was well-educated, but she did not seek refuge in the academy,” said author Tayari Jones, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. “She was a champion for all artists who may have been silenced.”
Youngblood lived all over the world, joining the Peace Corps after graduating from Clark Atlanta University and serving in Dominica, working as an au pair and model in Paris and living in Japan as a U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellow. Throughout her travels, Youngblood built strategic partnerships with theatres and created opportunities for women artists.
“Shay Youngblood was a true citizen of the world, and she did it without very much money or privilege—just a curiosity and desire to not only see the world but to be part of the world,” said Jones. Later in her career, Bentley pointed out, Youngblood partnered with Horizon Theatre, an early supporter of her work, to “make sure the voices of Black women, and our lives, were lived out onstage and that Black women were the playwrights of the stories.” Together they hosted small focus groups around Atlanta to find out what stories Black women wanted to see and hear, and Youngblood would draw on that energy and feedback to empower Black women playwrights to create those stories at Horizon.
One of Youngblood’s final works was Square Blues, a play about three generations of a Southern Black family who share a passion for activism and art but have conflict around the methods used to achieve freedom and what freedom looks like to each of them.
In addition to her theatre work, Youngblood was also a prolific, award-winning author of children’s books, novels, and poetry. Her work often mirrored her life: Youngblood’s first novel, Soul Kiss (1997), is about a young girl’s search for the father she never knew after the death of her mother. Youngblood, who lost her mother as a toddler, never had a relationship with her father. Youngblood’s second novel, Black Girl in Paris (2000), tells the story of Eden, a Black girl from Alabama who moves to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Working as an au pair and model, she finds herself by tracing the footsteps of writers who have come before her, including James Baldwin. Like Eden, Youngblood left Georgia to live as an artist in Paris, finding her voice as a writer during her journey.
“Black Girl in Paris was a phenomenal book because it opened up the world of Paris to Black girls around the globe and made the pursuit of greats like Baldwin plausible,” said Dr. Stephanie Evans, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. “The book spoke to many aspiring writers and researchers and was a favorite among students in my study abroad class, African Americans in Paris.”
Evans credited her work on Black author and activist Anna Julia Cooper, who received a degree from the Sorbonne in 1924, to the “model” Youngblood created “for researchers and Black feminist writers like me, to move beyond our immediate world and to better understand how the experience of being a young Black American woman translates across the globe.”
“One of the great things Shay did as a writer is, she made an African American story an international story with ‘Black Girl in Paris,” added Jones. “Shay created a portrait of a Black woman artist living her life unconventionally and on her own terms.”
“I believe Shay’s legacy is to continue to create, because as an artist, there is no alternative,” said Bentley. “Even after her diagnosis, she continued to create. She understood that you still create so that what you create is still there after you have made your transition, and hopefully that work touches another generation or your contemporaries that survive you. Her work stands. Her legacy is not only her body of work, but even when things got bad, she found a way to keep pushing, to create more art and create more opportunities for others.”
Nsenga K Burton, PhD is an award-winning entrepreneur, creative, writer, and media influencer. She is founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning news site The Burton Wire, which covers news of the African Diaspora.
