Jones, Gayl

November 23, 1949

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, novelist, poet, and critic Gayl Jones grew up listening to the African-American oral tradition that is prominent in her narratives. Storytelling, both oral and written, was a part of her family experience. Her grandmother wrote religious dramas, and her mother composed stories to entertain the children. Jones herself began writing fiction when she was seven or eight. She received several prizes for poetry while an English major at Connecticut College. She then studied creative writing at Brown University under William Meredith and Michael Harper. She published her first novel while still a graduate student. She taught creative writing and African-American literature at the University of Michigan until 1983; since then she has lived primarily in Paris and Lexington.

Jones's early novels focus on women driven to or over the edge of madness by the abuses they endure. The originality of her work lies in allowing these women to speak for themselves. Corregidora (1975), Eva's Man (1976), and the stories in White Rat (1977) are narrated by characters whose racial and sexual experiences are rendered in voices that are simultaneously obsessive in their concerns and ordinary in their idiom. Her later narratives are poems that present the history of blacks in the New World, including Brazil. Song for Anninho (1981), The Hermit-Woman (1983), and Xarque and Other Poems (1985) continue the focus on the suffering of black women but without the obsessive voices. Her work of criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991), explores folk traditions in the major writers of poetry and fiction. Two later novels, The Healing (1998) and Mosquito (1999), move in a more positive direction by depicting strong, articulate women capable of telling their own stories and creating meaningful relationships despite the difficulties of life. These works continue Jones's practice of being highly experimental in the ways these stories are told.

See also Literature of the United States; Poetry, U.S.

Bibliography

Bramen, Carrie Tirado. "Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones's Mosquito." Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 1 (2003): 124–154.

Byerman, Keith E. "Beyond Realism: The Fictions of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison." In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986, pp. 171–184.

Dubey, Madhu. "Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (1995): 245–267.

Ward, Jerry W. "Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones." Callaloo 5 (1982): 95–104.

keith e. byerman (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005