Shay Youngblood, a novelist and playwright whose works about her upbringing by a churchgoing group of “Big Mamas” and her adventures in Paris as a young aspiring writer inspired a generation of young black women, died June 11 at the home of a friend, Kelly Alexander. In Peachtree City, Ga. She was 64 years old.
Mrs. Alexander said the cause was ovarian cancer.
Ms. Youngblood, whose mother died when she was 2 and whose father was not in her life, grew up in a housing project in Columbus, Ga., where she was raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, as well as close relatives. A circle of eccentric and adoring mother stand-ins.
The Big Mamas – sullen, arthritic and wise – had a lot to offer the young Shay: their dim view of most men; his love of music, dance and church; his often mischievous sense of humor; A dignified, powerful resistance to the humiliation and horror inflicted on them by the racist white employers for whom they worked as maids.
Ms. Youngblood said she often prayed for her mother, but as she grew older, she appreciated the richness of her upbringing and turned the experience into her first book, “The Big Mama Stories” (1989), which preceded her first play, ” Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery” was published in Produced by the first Horizon Theater Company In Atlanta in 1988, it has since been staged all over the world, in schools and local theaters.
Carrie Reid wrote, “The simple act of focusing on the stories of black women, with barely any references to the men (white or black) in their lives, is itself an act of resistance.” In review For the Chicago Tribune, “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery” was produced in Chicago in 2017, 20 years after it was first staged there. “And the women we meet in Youngblood’s vaguely fierce, funny, and ultimately hopeful memory-play-with-music might just make you want to jump at the curtain call and run them all for office.”
Lisa Adler, Horizon’s longtime co-artistic director, recalls that when Ms. Youngblood gave her the play in its original raw form in the early 1980s, when they were both in their early 20s, she thought: “This is not quite a play. , but it is something. I have to do something!” She called director Glenda Dickerson and dramaturgs Gayle Austin and Isabelle Bagshaw, and together they shaped the work.
When “Shakin'” was picked up as a film project by Sidney Poitier, Ms. Youngblood used the money to attend graduate school at Brown University, where she studied with the playwright Paula Vogel and earned a master’s degree in creative writing in 1993. Film never happened.)
“The black girl writing world is especially small and the black queer girl writing world is even smaller, so we’ve known everyone for a long time,” Jacqueline Woodson, noted children’s author, novelist and poet, Ms. Said of Youngblood. “But ‘Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery’ was the first of hers I read, and I fell in love with it.
“It’s a celebration,” she continued, “of so many things about what it means to be the daughter — or niece or cousin or grandchild — of a black woman, and it makes me think of Dr. Rudin Sims Bishop” — a scholar Known for her work on multicultural children’s literature — “who said that people need mirrors and windows in their literature. Mirrors so they can recognize themselves. And windows so they can see worlds they might not even imagine. ‘Shakin’ was a mirror of myself to the world.
Actor, director and playwright Daniel Alexander Joneswho befriended Ms. Youngblood at Brown (and who helped stage “Shakin'” in Austin, Texas, in 1997), was struck by another play Ms. Youngblood wrote, “Black Power Barbie,” about a brother and The play, about a sister, both gay, whose parents were murdered Black Panthers, was reimagined by Ms. Youngblood in 2013.
“She was steeped in black queenship,” Mr. Jones said in an interview. “She did these beautiful love scenes, and it was a rare time to see black queer intimacy.” (Ms. Youngblood wrote the play in the early 1990s.)
“She really made us whole on stage,” he added. “She presaged something about the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Her work is more radical than it might first seem. It’s radical because it’s whole food.
Sharon Ellen Youngblood was born in Columbus on October 16, 1959, the only child of Mary Lee Kemp and Lonnie Willis Crosby. Her surname, Ms. Alexander said, came from one of her mother’s husbands.
Ms. Youngblood earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from Clark Atlanta University, then joined the Peace Corps and worked for two years as an agricultural information officer in Dominica. He then moved back to Atlanta, where he worked for a while Charis Books and moreOne of the oldest feminist bookstores in the country, where she got her start as a writer.
The store’s founder, Linda Bryant, forced her to read poetry there when she was in her early 20s. Ms. from the assignment. Youngblood panicked, who tried to bail even as the audience was settling down. But she got through it, and she later credited Ms. Bryant with launching her career.
She published her first novel, “Soul Kiss,” in 1997 about a young girl’s search for the father she never knew after her mother’s death. But it was her second novel, “Black Girl in Paris” (2000), that became a touchstone for many. It tells the story of Aidan, a 26-year-old Southern woman, seeking experience during the summer terrorist bombings in Paris. She feels uncertain but also free, and she prefers an assortment of somewhat sketchy mentors. She maps the city, noting its safe passages but also pinpointing the residences and hangouts of black artists who came before her, notably James Baldwin.
It’s Baedeker infused into a novel-memoir — Mrs. Youngblood, like her protagonist, traveled to Paris in her mid-20s and worked as an au pair and artist’s model — spiced with magical realism and recipes and how-tos.
In review For the Los Angeles Times, novelist Paula L. Woods praised the novel’s “sexiness, shifting sexuality and vivid imagery” and her recipes for pommes tarte tatin (apple tart) and gratin dauphinois (scalloped potato), calling it “a fascinating, unexpected portrait of the artist as a young black girl.
Ms. Youngblood was also the author of two illustrated children’s books, “Mama’s House” (2022) and “A Family Prayer” (2023). Among other honors, she won the Pushcart Prize for Fiction for “The Big Mama Stories,” one of the short stories in “The Big Mama Stories,” as well as the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award in 1993 for “Talking Bones” and several NAACP awards. Her plays, including those staged by Horizon in 2022, involve actors from nearly three generations.
“Black Girl in Paris” is being developed as a feature film by Natalie Bazil, whose novel “Queen Sugar” was adapted for television, and her daughter, Hyacinth Parker. At the time of her death, Ms. Youngblood was working on a book about her mother.
No immediate family members survive. Ms. Youngblood’s marriage to Annette Lawrence in 2010 ended in divorce in 2020.
“Before I left home I cut my hair close to my scalp so that I could be a free-thinking, free-spirited woman open to all possibilities,” Ms. Youngblood wrote in “Black Girl” in Paris. “I used to map the world. In ancient times maps were made to help people find food, water and the way back home. I needed a map to help me find love and language, and since one didn’t exist, I had to find one by following the trails and signs left by other travelers.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I wanted to be a woman who was bold, took chances and had adventures.”