Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women

• A celebration of the journey of African-American women toward a new spirituality grounded in social awareness, black American tradition, metaphysics, and heightened creativity.

• Features illuminating insights from Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Dolores Kendrick, Sonia Sanchez, Michele Gibbs, Geraldine McIntosh, Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Namonyah Soipan.

• By a widely published scholar, poet, and activist who has been interviewed by the press, television, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered

From the last part of the twentieth century through today, African-American women have experienced a revival of spirituality and creative force, fashioning a uniquely African-American way to connect with the divine. In Soul Talk, Akasha Gloria Hull examines this multifaceted spirituality that has both fostered personal healing and functioned as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice.

Through fascinating and heartfelt conversations with some of today's most creative and powerful women—women whose spirituality encompasses, among others, traditional Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American teachings, meditation, the I Ching, and African-derived ancestral reverence—the author explores how this new spiritual consciousness is manifested, how it affects the women who practice it, and how its effects can be carried to others. 

Using a unique and readable blend of interviews, storytelling, literary critique, and practical suggestions of ways readers can incorporate similar renewal into their daily lives, Soul Talk shows how personal and social change are possible through reconnection with the spirit.

Through fascinating and heartfelt conversations with some of today's most creative and powerful women the author explores how a new spiritual consciousness is manifested, how it affects the women who practice it, and how its effects can be carried to others. Using a unique and readable blend of interviews, storytelling and literary critique, Soul Talk shows how personal and social change become possible by reconnecting with the spirit.

Toni Morrison

Soul Talk is a worthy tribute to Toni Cade Bambara and to the lives and work of African American women writers.

Akasha Gloria Hull, Ph.D., has taught literature and Women's Studies at a variety of institutions, most recently the University of California at Santa Cruz, and has published widely under the name Gloria T. Hull. Her previous books include Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance; Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (co-edited); and Healing Heart: Poems. She lives in northern California.