Location: United States
Member Since:
Jan. 21, 2013
Shay Youngblood
Biography
Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris, Winter Prophet, a graphic novel, Black Power Barbie and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays, Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Flying Blind, Square Blues and Communism Killed My Dog. An Edward Albee honoree, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, several
NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She was a 2011 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission, Creative Artist Fellow. Currently she is a writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art.
"My interest in architecture has been fueled by my travels. I have lived on the East Coast, in the Deep South, Japan, Hawaii, France, Spain and the Caribbean, traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Denmark and once took a three month road trip across the United States. I have a particular weakness for shoes and my guilty pleasures are spa vacations and 72 hour reading orgies. I will try almost any cuisine or any activity once, more if I like it.
My art practice includes writing and painting, sometimes I combine the two. Among my creative goals are collaborations with a composer on an opera, an illustrator on a graphic novel and to develop an interdisciplinary work for the theater that integrates video animation."
NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She was a 2011 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission, Creative Artist Fellow. Currently she is a writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art.
"My interest in architecture has been fueled by my travels. I have lived on the East Coast, in the Deep South, Japan, Hawaii, France, Spain and the Caribbean, traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Denmark and once took a three month road trip across the United States. I have a particular weakness for shoes and my guilty pleasures are spa vacations and 72 hour reading orgies. I will try almost any cuisine or any activity once, more if I like it.
My art practice includes writing and painting, sometimes I combine the two. Among my creative goals are collaborations with a composer on an opera, an illustrator on a graphic novel and to develop an interdisciplinary work for the theater that integrates video animation."
Where to find Shay Youngblood online
Website: http://shayyoungblood.com
Books
Collected Plays
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$12.95 USD.
Words: 48,950.
Language:
English.
Published: August 28, 2016
.
Categories:
Plays » Women Authors, Plays » American / African American
The Collected Plays of Shay Youngblood includes Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, Flying Blind, Square Blues, Talking Bones and There are Many Houses in my Tribe.
Add Architecture, Stir Memory
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 10,980.
Language:
English.
Published: October 4, 2015
.
Categories:
Plays » Women Authors
Shay Youngblood explores, early memories of home, enduring friendship, loss and survival as seen through the lens of her visit to Japan and experience of 3/11, the 9.0 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear tragedy, ten days after her arrival in Tokyo from Texas. Fact and fiction, poetry and music, mix and mingle in interviews and narrative stories.
Winter Prophet
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 59,120.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Fiction » African American fiction » Historical, Fiction » Coming of age
Set in the late nineteenth century, the novel follows Winter Grace, the uniquely talented daughter of former slaves, who is determined to become an opera singer and her best friend, Nathan Fitzpatrick, an undertaker’s son, who dreams of becoming a boxer. There is little hope for either of their dreams to be realized in the small Kansas town where they grow into adulthood.
Talking Bones
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$3.99 USD.
Words: 13,460.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Plays » American / African American, Plays » Women Authors
Talking Bones is set in Ancestor’s Books & Breakfast, a half empty bookstore in a small Southern town, where three generations of women, Ruth, her daughter Baybay and her grand daughter Eila, hear the ancestors through a broken hearing aid, whispers in the dark and in talking bones. The ancestors bring a message about love, faith and family.
Square Blues
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$3.99 USD.
Words: 14,880.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Plays » American / African American, Plays » Women Authors
Square Blues follows, a reparations activist, his mother Odessa, who married a Jewish store owner in the 1940’s and her grand daughter Karma, an art activist, during one summer weekend in the early 1990’s during which each member of his family is challenged to stand up for their beliefs in ways that threaten to tear the family apart.
Soul Kiss
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 59,170.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Fiction » African American fiction » General
Soul Kiss is a coming of age novel about an African American girl, Mariah Kin Santos, who explores issues of identity, the fluid nature of sexuality, community as family and the boundaries of familial love.
Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery a play
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 13,450.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Plays » American / African American
Adapted from the collection Big Mama Stories, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery is a coming of age play about a young girl whose community of mothers relive stories about their lives to help usher Daughter into womanhood after her first period the summer she turns twelve.
Hotel Stories erotica vol 1
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$5.99 USD.
Words: 9,600.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Fiction » Erotica » Contemporary
In these series of funny, unsettling, erotic, heart-breaking and sensual stories set in hotels around the world, hotel guests discover private passions, unexpected pleasures, hope, redemption, small pleasures and discover the darkest parts of themselves when faced with four anonymous walls and a bed. Stories in Volume 1 are set in New York City.
Black Power Barbie
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 19,140.
Language:
English.
Published: February 1, 2013
.
Categories:
Fiction » Literary collections » American / African American
Written in the form of a graphic novel, Tabitha X and her younger brother, Jackson Five, the children of murdered African American Civil Rights activists, battle for Black Power Barbie as they relive vivid and frightening memories in therapy sessions in the mid 1990’s. As adults, Tabitha remains psychologically wounded, living in the past, while Jackson faces the reality of living with AIDS.
Black Girl in Paris
by Shay Youngblood
Price:
$9.95 USD.
Words: 65,160.
Language:
English.
Published: January 22, 2013
.
Categories:
Fiction » Literary collections » American / African American, Fiction » LGBTQ+ » General
Eden leaves her home, in the American South arriving in Paris, where she experiments freely, inhabiting different incarnations - artist's model, poet's helper, au pair, teacher, thief, and lover - to heal the wounds of her broken heart, discover her sexual self, and, finally, to wrestle her dreams of becoming a writer into reality.