It's All Love ─ Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family and Friends

In It’s All Love, Black writers celebrate the complexity, power, danger, and glory of love in all its many forms: romantic, familial, communal, and sacred. Editor Marita Golden recounts the morning she woke up certain that she would meet her soul mate in “My Own Happy Ending”; memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts, in a piece he calls “Learning the Name Dad,” writes stirringly about serving time in prison and how that transformed his life for the better; New York Times bestselling author Pearl Cleage is at her best in the delicate, touching “Missing You”; award-winning author David Anthony Durham enraptures readers with his “An Act of Faith”; New York Times bestselling author L. A. Banks is both funny and wise in her beautiful essay on discovering love as a child, “Two Cents and a Question.” And the poetry of love is here, too—from Gwendolyn Brooks’s classic “Black Wedding Song” to works by Nikki Giovanni, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Kwame Alexander. It’s All Love is a dazzling, delightfully diverse exploration of the wonderful gift of love.

MARITA GOLDEN is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Migrations of the Heart, Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex, and the award-winning novel After. She is cofounder and president emeritus of the Hurston/ Wright Foundation.


The Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation is the nation’s resource center for writers, readers, and supporters of Black literature. Founded in 1990 by Marita Golden and Clyde McElvene, the Foundation’s mission is to discover, develop, and honor Black writers at every stage of their development.