Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition

"The survival of these women and their joy makes Home Girls very satisfying." (Essence) “A provocative and important collection.” (Ms.) "Pungent and varied, full of questions, convictions, and insights." (The Nation) "It is fitting that Home Girls also reflects and celebrates the difference, among the [thirty-three] Black feminist writers, critics, and theorists assembled from the United States and the Caribbean, among Black women of all colors, classes, and cultures. More importantly, it reflects and celebrates our connections." (Women's Review of Books) "Home Girls is a book that has been saving lives and freeing communities for my entire lifetime. The Black Feminist revolutionary ethic and aesthetic that this book founds, documents and forwards is the best hope for survival and well-being that our species has. Read or re-read this book as if everything depends upon it. It does."
  - Alexis Pauline Gumbs (author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals) “Groundbreaking…Though written years ago, Smith’s words are as valid today as they were then.” (Shondaland) “There is a profound need for those in communities that are taken for granted (or taken advantage of) to give voice to their joy, pain, and ambitions. Home Girls is a must-read for those who wish to understand, to grow, and to learn.” (Black Lesbian Literary Collective) “Considered by many to be the essential book on feminism, Home Girls is a selection of profound essays penned by intriguing feminists as well as lesbian activists.” (VIBE) "Home Girls is a repository of Black lesbian and feminist life, an animate archive that holds the breadth and depth of Black women’s intellectual and political acuity. Home Girls expands the episteme of Black Studies, offering a method to examine the simultaneity of oppression, a vision of freedom that eclipses captivity. Forty years later, this autopoietic text renews the life of Black Feminism, supplying us with incisive language for living." - Briona Simone Jones (editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought) "With its warm, inviting and endearing title, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, this still classic work became foundational as it helped to develop a whole field in which generations of scholars learned the politics of coalition building, organizing, writing responsively and creatively about the Black woman’s experience in global contexts. The 'simultaneity of oppressions' logic which is its theoretical framework still provides an analytical model for assessing how these structures of power are even more clarified today but also how Black women have constantly challenged enforced locations." - Carole Boyce Davies (author of Black Women's Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power)