Ann Allen Shockley

Ann Allen Shockley (born June 21, 1927) is an American journalist, editor and author, specialising in themes of interracial lesbian love, especially the plight of black lesbians living under what she views as the "triple oppression" of racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has also encouraged libraries to place special emphasis on Afro-American collections.

Life and career Shockley was born in 1927 in Louisville, Kentucky. Shockley was encouraged to read and write creatively at a young age and was heavily influenced by Richard Wright's short-story form in Uncle Tom's Children. Her eighth-grade teacher, Harriet La Forest, was said to serve as Shockley's early mentor and had a large influence on Shockley's writing.

She started writing for an audience in high school, where she worked as the editor for her school's newspaper. She continued to work as a journalist and column writer for various newspapers in her undergraduate studies and later graduated with a bachelor's degree from Fisk University in 1948. Shockley went on to receive her master's degree in library science from Case Western Reserve University in 1959.

She married teacher William Shockley in 1948, and had two children named William Leslie Jr. and Tamara Ann.

Shockley was awarded the Lee Lynch Classics Award for her novel Loving Her, originally published in 1974 and republished in 2014. The award was awarded in 2019 as a part of the 15th Annual Goldie Literary Awards held by the United States's only lesbian literary organization, the Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS). In honor of her body of work, she also received the Alice B Readers Award in 2006 which included an Honorarium of $500 along with the Alice B Medal.

Major works

Newspaper columns Throughout July 1945 through March 1954, Shockley worked as a freelance newspaper columnist. She has several works in newspaper columns documented in the Louisville Defender, Fisk University Herald, Federalsburg [MD] Times, and Bridgeville [DE] News that centered primarily on issues in the African-American community and LGBT community. Her writings can be found under "Mostly Teen Talk", "Duffy's Corner", and "Ebony's Topics".

Non-fiction A History of Public Library Services to Negroes in the South, 1900–1955 (1960) A Handbook for the Administration of Special Black Collections (1970) Living Black American Authors: A Biographical Directory (comp. and ed. with Sue P. Chandler) (1973) Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (1988)

Fiction Not to Be Alone (unpublished novel) (1950b)

Shockley's first novel, Loving Her (1974), was the first of its kind as it worked to validate interracial lesbian love. It was also the first novel to use a female, same-gender-loving/lesbian, African-American protagonist.

In her collection of short stories, The Black and White of It, Shockley also stages an African-American lesbian as the main characters, using successful women who are professional and strong in nature face struggles with sexuality. In "Play It but Don't Say it", Shockley places a Congresswoman as her protagonist, and in "Holly Craft Isn't Gay", the character, a successful singer, goes as far as attempting to have a child in order to appear straight.

Criticism The Black and White of It (1980), although generally unknown, received better response from critics as well as her short story collection Say Jesus and Come to Me (1982). Say Jesus and Come to Me in particular was said to introduce and recognize a character that typically lacks representation and appeared on the Christopher Street best seller's list, however Shockley was still criticized for her writing style and lack of structure in the stories. The collection takes a focus on the character Reverend Black, a lesbian aged forty who tries to hide her sexuality. Shockley claimed to have written the piece in order to shed light on the black church's hypocrisy of shaming homosexuals yet partaking in all other acts deemed as sins.

Although recognized by authors such as Alice Walker, who gave Loving Her praise in her review of the novel in 1974 as well as Nellie McKay and Rita B. Dandridge who have acknowledged the writer, Shockley's fictional works has been often ignored by the masses if not criticized. Shockley herself attributes this lack of recognition due to the subject matter that she writes about. She claims that works addressing lesbian themes were rare at the time, as most publishers were not interested and writers were too fearful to admit to their own sexuality to push for publishing.

Journals have come out that go as far to say that Shockley complicates same-gender loving as well as problematizes it through her characterizations of African-American people who also happen to be homosexual. Along with this, some argue that Shockley uses too many generalizations in her texts, has a poor stylistic choice, and did not work to battle common stereotypes about black lesbianism. In her first novel, Loving Her, the main character, Renay, chooses to live her life as a lesbian but still performs stereotypically heteronormative notions on romance, which works against Shockley's supposed intentions of exposing what a lesbian relationship really is like in the late twentieth-century. However, as the first novel representing an interracial relationship between two women, Loving Her does not exist within a historical framework in which it could serve as a satirical response to, and so is sometimes have been interpreted as a naive reinforcement of heteronormative and racist ideas about queer relationships and black women, rather than a potentially self-aware piece. Nonetheless, the fictional novel is still one of the first of its kind.