Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara was a storyteller, activist, filmmaker, and teacher who believed that art was not separate from revolution but was revolution's most powerful tool. Her short story collections — Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) — captured Black community life with a musicality and authenticity that influenced a generation of writers. Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) won the American Book Award.

Born Miltona Mirkin Cade in New York City in 1939, she grew up in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Queens. She took the name Bambara from a signature she found in her great-grandmother's sketchbook. She attended Queens College, studied theater in Florence, and earned her master's from City College of New York. She was a social worker, community organizer, and professor who viewed writing as an extension of organizing.

Bambara's work is characterized by its use of Black vernacular English, its centering of Black women and girls, and its insistence that healing — personal and collective — is both necessary and possible. She was also a pioneering documentary filmmaker; her film The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) documented the Philadelphia police's bombing of the MOVE organization's headquarters. She joined the ancestors in 1995 at 56, but her influence lives on in every writer who understands that stories are how communities survive.