Shay Youngblood, a novelist and playwright whose works about her upbringing by a churchgoing cohort of “Huge Mamas” and her adventures in Paris as a younger aspiring author impressed a era of younger Black ladies, died on June 11 on the house of a pal, Kelley Alexander, in Peachtree Metropolis, Ga. She was 64.
Ms. Alexander stated the trigger was ovarian most cancers.
Ms. Youngblood, whose mom died when she was 2 years outdated and whose father was not in her life, grew up in a housing venture in Columbus, Ga., the place she raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, together with an in depth circle of eccentric and adoring maternal stand-ins.
The Huge Mamas — stoic, arthritic and smart — had a lot to impart to the younger Shay: their dim view of most males; their love of music, dancing and church; their typically bawdy humor; their dignified, highly effective resistance to the indignities and horrors visited upon them by the racist white employers for whom they labored as maids.
Ms. Youngblood stated that she prayed typically for her mom to return, however that as she grew older, she appreciated the richness of her upbringing and turned the expertise into her first guide, “The Huge Mama Tales” (1989), which earlier than being revealed was tailored into her first play, “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Distress.” First produced by the Horizon Theater Firm in Atlanta in 1988, it has since been staged all around the world, in faculties and native theaters.
“The straightforward act of centering on the tales of Black ladies, with barely any references to the boys (white or Black) of their lives, is itself an act of resistance,” Kerry Reid wrote in a evaluation for The Chicago Tribune when “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Distress” was produced in Chicago in 2017, 20 years after its first staging there. “And the ladies we meet in Youngblood’s unapologetically fierce, humorous and in the end hopeful memory-play-with-music may make you wish to soar up on the curtain name and ask all of them to run for workplace.”
Lisa Adler, Horizon’s longtime co-artistic director, recalled that when Ms. Youngblood gave her the play in its authentic uncooked type within the early Nineteen Eighties, once they have been each of their early 20s, she thought: “This isn’t fairly a play, nevertheless it’s one thing. I’ve acquired to do one thing!” She convened the director Glenda Dickerson and the dramaturgs Gayle Austin and Isabelle Bagshaw, and collectively they formed the work.
When “Shakin’” was optioned as a movie venture by Sidney Poitier, Ms. Youngblood used the cash to attend graduate faculty at Brown College, the place she studied with the playwright Paula Vogel and earned a grasp’s diploma in artistic writing in 1993. (The movie was by no means made.)
“The Black lady writing world is very small and the Black queer lady writing world is even smaller, so we’ve identified every for a very long time,” Jacqueline Woodson, the famous youngsters’s writer, novelist and poet, stated of Ms. Youngblood. “However ‘Shakin’ the Mess Outta Distress’ was the primary work of hers I learn, and I simply fell in love with it.
“It’s a celebration,” she continued, “of so many issues about what it means to be a daughter — or niece or cousin or grandchild — of a Black lady, and it makes me consider Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop” — a scholar identified for her work on multicultural youngsters’s literature — “who stated that folks want mirrors and home windows of their literature. Mirrors to allow them to acknowledge themselves. And home windows to allow them to see into worlds they could by no means in any other case think about. ‘Shakin’’ was that mirror of myself on the planet in a much bigger manner.”
The performer, director and playwright Daniel Alexander Jones, who befriended Ms. Youngblood at Brown (and who helped stage “Shakin’” in Austin, Texas, in 1997), recalled being struck by one other play that Ms. Youngblood wrote, “Black Energy Barbie,” a few brother and sister, each homosexual, whose dad and mom have been Black Panthers who had been murdered. The play was reimagined by Ms. Youngblood as a graphic novel in 2013.
“It was a dive into Black queerness,” Mr. Jones stated in an interview. “She staged these stunning love scenes, and it was a uncommon time to see Black queer intimacy.” (Ms. Youngblood wrote the play within the early Nineteen Nineties.)
“She actually made us complete onstage,” he added. “She presaged one thing concerning the fluidity and multiplicity of identification. Her work is way extra radical than it would first appear to be. It’s radical as a result of it’s complete meals.”
Sharon Ellen Youngblood was born Oct. 16, 1959, in Columbus, the one youngster of Mary Lee Kemp and Lonnie Willis Crosby. Her surname, Ms. Alexander stated, got here from certainly one of her mom’s husband’s.
Ms. Youngblood earned a bachelor’s diploma in communications from Clark Atlanta College, after which she joined the Peace Corps and labored for 2 years as an agriculture data officer in Dominica. She then moved again to Atlanta, the place for a time she labored at Charis Books & Extra, one of many nation’s oldest feminist bookstores, the place she acquired her begin as a author.
The shop’s founder, Linda Bryant, nudged her into having a poetry studying there when she was in her early 20s. The project terrified Ms. Youngblood, who tried to bail even because the viewers was settling in. However she pulled by, and she or he later credited Ms. Bryant with jump-starting her profession.
She revealed her first novel, “Soul Kiss,” a few younger lady’s seek for the daddy she by no means knew after the loss of life of her mom, in 1997. However it was her second novel, “Black Lady in Paris” (2000), that turned a touchstone for a lot of. It tells the story of Eden, a 26-year-old Southern lady on a quest for expertise in Paris throughout a summer time of terror bombings there. She feels precarious but in addition free, and she or he picks up an assortment of somewhat-sketchy mentors. She makes maps of town, to notice its protected routes but in addition to pinpoint the habitats and hangouts of the Black artists who got here earlier than her, notably James Baldwin.
It’s a Baedeker tucked right into a novel-memoir — Ms. Youngblood, like her protagonist, traveled to Paris in her mid-20s and labored as an au pair and an artist’s mannequin — spiced with magic realism and strewn with recipes and how-to’s.
In a evaluation for The Los Angeles Instances, the novelist Paula L. Woods praised the novel’s “eroticism, shifting sexuality and vivid imagery,” and its recipes for pommes tarte Tatin (apple tart) and gratin dauphinois (scalloped potatoes), calling it “an enticing, unpredictable portrait of an artist as a younger Black lady.”
Ms. Youngblood was additionally the writer of two illustrated youngsters’s books, “Mama’s Dwelling” (2022) and “A Household Prayer” (2023). Amongst different honors, she gained a Pushcart Prize for fiction for “Born With Faith,” one of many quick tales in “The Huge Mama Tales,” in addition to a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award in 1993 for “Speaking Bones” and several other N.A.A.C.P. awards for her performs, which embody “Sq. Blues,” about three generations of activists, staged by Horizon in 2022.
“Black Lady in Paris” is being developed as a function movie by Natalie Baszile, whose novel “Queen Sugar” was tailored for tv, and her daughter, Hyacinth Parker. At her loss of life, Ms. Youngblood was engaged on a guide about her mom.
No fast relations survive. Ms. Youngblood’s marriage to Annette Lawrence, in 2010, led to divorce in 2020.
“Earlier than I left house I reduce my hair near my scalp so I may very well be a free lady with free ideas, open to all potentialities,” Ms. Youngblood wrote in “Black Lady in Paris.” “I used to be making a map of the world. In historical instances maps have been made to assist folks discover meals, water, and the way in which again house. I wanted a map to assist me discover love and language, and since one didn’t exist, I’d must invent one, following the paths and indicators left by different vacationers.
“I didn’t know what I needed to be, however I knew I needed to be the sort of lady who was daring, took probabilities, and had adventures.”
