“A multilayered delight. Since I first encountered Kathleen Collins’s writing as an MFA student, I’ve long wanted to inhabit the sultry, brilliant rooms she is uniquely able to render, and all the more so now. On their own, Collins’s scripts and plays offer up a vibrant kaleidoscope of Black life teeming with artists, activists, daredevil pilots, heartbroken women, caddish men, and just a bit of magic. But taken together—with the loving, diligent scholarship of Samantha N. Sheppard, Hayley O’Malley, and Alix Beeston—this collection becomes a meditation on the fortitude and self-belief required of the female artist. Against rejection, poverty, setbacks, and misunderstandings, again and again and again Kathleen Collins returns to her page, committed to actualizing her singular voice and vision—and in the process, discovering honesty and brilliance that jump off the page.”—Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times–bestselling author of Need Blind: A Memoir of Class and Climbing in America
“The inimitable Kathleen Collins produced a body of work that brilliantly ventures beyond the limits and expectations imposed on Black women and our storytelling. In this inspiring collection, Sheppard, O’Malley, and Beeston recover and contextualize Collins’s radical visions for the screen and stage. Read the words of Kathleen Collins aloud, and experience the depths of her intellect, insight, wit, and humanism.”—Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, host of Turner Classic Movies’ Silent Sunday Nights and author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
“Sheppard, O’Malley, and Beeston have done a tremendous service for film, theater, and performance studies. Pulling from Kathleen Collins’s voluminous body of work, they creatively blend razor-sharp contextual prefaces, interviews with women directors influenced by Collins, and a poignant postscript as they offer access to some of Collins’s most dynamic plays and screenplays. This compilation is a wonderful gift to stage and film directors, drama students and teachers, and scholars who will now have the opportunity to read, produce, and teach Collins’s works. Hallelujah!”—L. H. Stallings, author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life
“This groundbreaking collection gathers, for the first time, Kathleen Collins’s unpublished and previously unavailable plays and screenplays and presents them with rigorously researched context, brilliant analysis, and vital critical frameworks for the deep appreciation of Collins’s masterful works. The result is essential reading that expands the known oeuvre of this remarkable twentieth-century playwright and filmmaker.”—Allyson Nadia Field, author of Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History
“Having witnessed and contributed to Kathleen Collins’s rediscovery and restoration within our cinematic imaginary, I am thrilled to welcome this indispensable collection that brings Collins’s literary and cinematic work into sustained conversation. It offers a fuller account of her singular artistic vision and affirms the enduring, vital dialogue between Black literature and Black cinema.”—Terri Simone Francis, author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism
