Gayl Jones
Gayl Jones, born on November 23, 1949, in Lexington, Kentucky, is an acclaimed author known for her contributions to literature as a writer, poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. A graduate of Connecticut College and Brown University, she has garnered recognition for her unique storytelling style, which often incorporates gothic elements and explores themes of madness, violence, and sexuality, particularly through the lens of Black women's experiences.
Her most notable works include her debut novel "Corregidora" (1975), a narrative that delves into the psychological scars of slavery and sexual abuse across generations, and "Eva's Man" (1976), which addresses the complex effects of violence in a male-dominated society. Throughout her career, Jones has maintained a focus on first-person narratives, inviting readers to engage deeply with her complex characters.
In addition to her novels, she has produced volumes of short stories and poetry, continuing to receive critical acclaim well into the 2020s, with "The Birdcatcher" (2022) being a finalist for the National Book Award. Jones’s work is characterized by its exploration of character psychology, oral history, and the rich tradition of Black storytelling, making her a significant figure in contemporary literature.
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Subject Terms
Gayl Jones
- Born: November 23, 1949
- Birthplace: Lexington, Kentucky
Author Profile
Writer, poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and teacher, Gayl Jones was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and attended Connecticut College, graduating in 1971 with a bachelor's degree in English. While there, she received the college's Frances Steloff Award for Fiction. She then attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to begin graduate work in creative writing. She graduated from Brown in 1973 with a master of arts degree, and in 1976, Jones received a doctorate in arts degree from Brown.
Jones is best known for the intense and probing nature of her gothic tales, which mix the conventions of the gothic with radically unconventional worlds of madness, sexuality, and violence. Jones began writing seriously at age seven under the encouraging and guiding influence of her grandmother, her mother, and, eventually, her high school Spanish teacher, Anna Dodd. Her later mentors would be Michael S. Harper and William Meredith at Brown University. She published her first and best-known novel, Corregidora (1975), while working on her doctorate at Brown.
No stranger to the art of writing and storytelling, Jones grew up in a household of female creative writers: Her grandmother wrote plays for church productions. Jones’s mother, Lucille, started writing in fifth grade and read stories she had written to Jones and her brother. It is, therefore, not surprising that stories, storytelling, and family history are the source of most of the material for her fiction.
In addition to her distinction as teller of intense stories about insanity and the psychological effects of violence on Black women, another characteristic of Jones’s art is her consistent use of the first person for her protagonists. Claiming neither “political compulsions nor moral compulsions,” Jones is first and foremost interested in the “psychology of characters” and therefore seeks to examine their “puzzles,” as she states, by simply letting her characters “tell their stories.” Her interest in the character as storyteller permits her to evoke oral history and engage the Black American tradition of storytelling, which she accomplishes in her novels Corregidora and Eva’s Man (1976).
Corregidora, a historical novel, is what Jones calls a blues narrative. The novel examines the psychological effects of slavery and sexual abuse on three generations of women, particularly Ursa, a professional blues singer. Eva’s Man, Jones’s more provocative and controversial second novel, explores the psychological effects of violence. Eva Medina Canada, the protagonist–narrator, tells in confusing but gripping detail the story of her violent reaction to her victimization in a male-dominated society. Jones continued her thematic concerns with White Rat (1977), a volume of twelve short stories, and Song for Anninho (1981), a long narrative poem. In addition to her fiction, which, by the early 2020s, included the National Book Award finalist novel The Healing (1998) as well as 1999's Mosquito, 2021's Palmares, and 2022's The Birdcatcher, 2024's The Unicorn Woman, and essay writing, Jones has taught full-time, written poetry, and conducted research. Jones books continue to focus on first-person narratives and complex characters. Recognizing the ability of her work to have relevance across generations despite several years between her last publication, after Palmares was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, The Birdcatcher became a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction, almost twenty-five years after The Healing had achieved the same feat.
Bibliography
Als, Hilton. "Gayl Jone's Novels of Oppression." The New Yorker, 27 Sep. 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/gayl-hones-novels-of-oppression. Accessed 30 Sep. 2024.
Ashraf, H. A. “‘Relate Sexual to Historical.’” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 2, 2000, pp. 273–97.
Barksdale, Richard K. “Castration Symbolism in Recent Black American Fiction.” College Language Association Journal, vol. 29, no. 4, 1986, pp. 400–13.
Bell, Bernard. “The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones.” Comparative Literature Studies 36, no. 3, 1999, pp. 247–58.
Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Temple UP, 1995.
Freed, Joanne Lipson. "Gendered Narratives of Trauma and Revision in Gayl Jones's Corregidora. African American Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 409–20.
LeBlanc, Lauren. “On Art and Artists, Love and Violence, in Paradise.” The Boston Globe, 8 Sept. 2022, www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/08/arts/art-artists-love-violence-paradise/. Accessed 30 Sep. 2024.
Lordi, Emily J. "Haunting: Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature. Rutgers UP, 2013.
Perry, Imani. "She Changed Black Literature Forever. Then She Disappeared." The New York Times Magazine, 17 Sept. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/magazine/gayl-jones-novel-palmares.html. Accessed 30 Sep. 2024.
Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. State U of New York P, 1991.
Wilcox, Janelle. “Resistant Silence, Resistant Subject: (Re)Reading Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” Genders, vol. 23, 1996, pp. 72–96.
Yukins, Elizabeth. “Bastard Daughters and the Possession of History in Corregidora and Paradise.” Signs, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 221–47.