An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women's experiences across the African diaspora. Growing up in World War II era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929 -2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou Marshall's legacy is often overlooked.