Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction
Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic,
yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the
twentieth century.
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a
force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the
Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and
achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social
justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely
in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like
James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her
story has been diminished and relegated to one work--until now. In
2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS
American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted
Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional,
illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.
After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her
prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his
brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African
anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the
Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she
identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being
outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations.
Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians,
including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson,
W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a
powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life--a life that was
tragically cut far too short.
A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for
Nonfiction
A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist