African-American poet, author, and academic who wrote The Peacock Poems and Working Cotton, among other poetic and prose works. She also published a non-fiction work entitled Giving Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature.
She studied English at California State University in Fresno. Later, she pursued graduate study at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
She received a 1984 Fulbright grant that funded travel to Ghana.
She grew up with three sisters in the Fresno, California housing projects. Sadly, her father died of tuberculosis when she was just eight years old.
She and poet Carla Harryman were literary contemporaries and fellow Californians.
