Joy Keys chats with Author & Playwright Pearl Cleage about her memoir

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta based writer, currently Mellon Playwright in Residence at The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta where her play, “What I Learned in Paris,” opened the 2012-2013 Season. Her works include award winning plays, bestselling novels and numerous columns, articles and essays for a wide variety of publications including Essence, Ebony, Rap Pages, Vibe, The Atlanta Tribune, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Her first novel, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day, was an Oprah Book Club pick and spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She is the author of thirteen plays, including Flyin’ West, the most produced new American play in the country in 1994. Her Blues for An Alabama Sky was included in Her the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta and will receive a 20th anniversary revival at the Alliance in 2015. other plays include Chain; Late Bus to Mecca; Bourbon at the Border; A Song for Coretta and The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Year. She is the author of eight novels, including Baby Brother’s Blues, which received an NAACP Image Award for Literature.

She is also the co-author with her husband, writer Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., of We Speak Your Names, a praise poem commissioned by Oprah Winfrey for her 2005 Legends Weekend. Cleage and Burnett are frequent collaborators, including their award winning ten year performance series, “Live at Club Zebra!” featuring their work as writers and performance artists. Her new book of non-fiction entitled Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons and Love Affairs, was published by Simon and Schuster/ATRIA Books in April, 2014.