McKINLEY, Catherine E(lizabeth) 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born April 25, 1967, in Boston, MA; daughter of Donald Sellers and Elizabeth (Wilson) McKinley. Education: Attended University of West Indies, 1987-88; Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1989; attended Cornell University (African studies), 1989-91.

ADDRESSES:

Home—P.O. Box 277, Cooper Square Station, New York, NY 10276. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Tanya Mckinnon, Mary Evans, Inc. 242 East Fifth St., New York, NY 10003.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, and educator. Feminist Press of the City University of New York, editorial assistant, 1991-92; Marie Brown Associates Literary Services, New York, NY, associate, 1992-94; Eugene Lange College, New School University, New York, NY, writing instructor, 1995; PEN writers fund coordinator and open book committee, 1996-97; City College of New York, teacher of creative writing and associate director of publishing certificate program, 1997—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Audre Lorde Award, New York Foundation for the Arts; MacDowell Colony for the Arts residency; Fulbright scholar in Ghana, West Africa, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

(Editor with L. Joyce DeLaney) Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1995.

The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (memoir), Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Catherine E. McKinley coedited a first with L. Joyce Delaney—Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing. The volume's title comes from the name of a lover in "Tar Beach," an essay excerpted from Audre Lorde's autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and included in the collection.

In reviewing Afrekete for the Lambda Book Report, Karen Shoffner noted that in her essay, coeditor Linda Villarosa "details the condemnations of homosexuality sometimes cloaked as concern for her soul she endured and the education she gave herself in biblical scripture. Finally feeling intellectually equipped, she searched for a spiritual home. Villarosa's experiences are heartening, and the clarity of her writing immensely satisfying."

The volume contains essays, stories, and poetry, and begins and ends with Lorde, the last piece being "Today is Not the Day," written shortly before Lorde's death. "It is moving not only because of her death," said Shoffner, "but also because of her magic with words and the strength she had in facing mortality which is apparent behind her words."

Advocate writer Nikki Baker wrote that "as are most anthologies, Afrekete is uneven. Some pieces are better than others, but all are provocative."

In addition to the well-known writings of Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Pat Parker, the editors have included young writers whose work has never before been read. Among the younger contributors are Michelle Parkerson, Jocelyn Maria Taylor, and Jamika Ajalon. Women's Review of Books contributor Adrian T. Oktenberg "was disappointed" by the contributions made by these three, and particularly commented on filmmaker Taylor's essay on exhibitionism and sex work. "Their pieces all include highly interesting information on the theme of what it means to be a young Black Lesbian now," said Oktenberg, "but the editors could have helped the writers by cutting and shaping their pieces to better effect. Ajalon in particular is highly talented. Her autobiographical and aptly named fiction 'Kaleidoscope,' though it is too long and focuses on nearly everything …nevertheless shines through with energy and narrative drive."

Oktenberg noted as an example of the "wonderful writing" to be found in Afrekete Carolivia Herron's story "The Old Lady," wherein the narrator recalls the loves of her younger self. "Written in an incantatory, rhythmic prose that shines and shimmers and moves with light, this story is gorgeous, powerful writing," said Oktenberg, who addded that Michelle Cliff's "Screen Memory," from her collection Bodies of Water, is "similarly powerful, and as exact and richly atmospheric." Oktenberg noted that the editors have not tried to cover all there is to say about black lesbianism, but noted that what they have done "is a great deal to accomplish in a single book. One can only say, it's about time, and welcome."

McKinley grew up the biracial adopted child of a politically progressive family in a small, predominantly white, working-class town in Massachusetts. As an adult, she researched her birth history, made difficult by the fact that hers had been a closed adoption for which the records were sealed. She had always assumed, and wanted to believe, that her natural parents were black, but what she eventually learned was that her mother was a white Jewish woman, and that it was her father who was black and part Native American. The book in which McKinley reveals the complexities of her search, The Book of Sarahs: A Memoir of Race and Identity is so titled because her mother named three of her daughters Sarah: the author, an older sister who was also given up for adoption, and a half-sister. McKinley also met seven of her father's eleven other children.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that "McKinley's eight-year search for family did not bring her what she expected or wanted to find, but instead a big crazy quilt from which she had to construct a pattern and stitch her own self-image." A Publishers Weekly reviewer said that "McKinley writes beautifully in this debut memoir, never resorting to sentimentality or easy emotions within this tangled web of emotional and family secrets." "In the end, the treasure McKinley seems to have discovered is her own independent self," wrote Ellen D. Gilbert in Library Journal.

McKinley told CA: "I started writing The Book of Sarahs in a period of intense mourning that followed a year of overwhelming revelations: in 1997, after seven years of searching for my birth family, I reunited with my biological parents and several of a dozen siblings, including two sisters who shared my original name, Sarah. The story of the Sarahs revealed my birthparents' choices and huge inabilities (partly stemming from my birthmother's struggle with mental illness). At the same time, I began integrating my Jewish birthmother and African-American and Choctaw father's heritage into my heretofore unspecified (because my adoption records were legally closed) 'biracial' black life. All of this new knowledge forced me to reckon with perhaps the most uncomfortable truth: the extent of the protective skein of fantasies and the lies I'd told on myself since early childhood.

"I am a fiction writer, and my creative wrestlings with transracial adoption originally came to me as fiction, but very soon, the real narrative of my birth history eclipsed my imagination. A writer I admire, Philip Gourevitch, has remarked: 'This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is in fact real.' He is writing about genocide in Rwanda. It's a wonderful quote, perhaps inappropriately applied here to individual tragi-comedy. Yet I am a child of a once-projected genocide. I grew up as one of just a few thousand black and bi-racial children adopted into white homes in the 1960s-1970s, when black social workers were calling up the specter of the mass destruction of black children as they organized to end such adoptions. I spent most of my young life in the realm of imagination—imagining, re-imagining and re-making myself a thousand times into the black woman I thought I would be if I had grown up with my biological family, bucking my adoptive parents' largely socially isolated life of wilderness-seeking. At the same time, I was being handed a heritage, and a connection to other black lives through literature. I had trouble talking; I was alone most of the time. Writing became a way to communicate, and to place myself comfortably within community. By the time I began my search, I knew that I wanted to try to write, in an exacting way, about the inside of transracial adoption, and a facet of post-1960s transracially adopted 'mulatted' social experience. Everyone was projecting the tragic—I wanted to expose the pain and reach for the comic, the unsentimental.

"Now, if, even at the end of searching, my biological family—and what I once hoped would be a pass to easy, 'legitimate' membership in a race, a family, is still lost to me, I do have the community of the word, and the power as a writer to insert trans-bi girls into the literary imagination."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

McKinley, Catherine E., The Book of Sarahs: A Memoir of Race and Identity, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, May 16, 1995, Nikki Baker, review of Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, p. 64.

Booklist, October 1, 2002, Vanessa Bush, review of The Book of Sarahs: A Memoir of Race and Identity, p. 299.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2002, review of The Book of Sarahs, p. 935.

Lambda Book Report, July-August, 1995, Karen Shoffner, review of Afrekete, p. 27.

Library Journal, June 1, 1995, Lisa Nussbaum, review of Afrekete, p. 114; July, 2002, Ellen D. Gilbert, review of The Book of Sarahs, p. 106.

Ms., May-June, 1995, Mattie Richardson, review of Afrekete, p. 74.

Publishers Weekly, April 24, 1995, review of Afrekete, p. 68; July 1, 2002, review of The Book of Sarahs, p. 65.

Women's Review of Books, July, 1995, Adrian T. Oktenberg, review of Afrekete, p. 30.

ONLINE

Zami.org,http://www.zami.org/ (October 19, 2002), review of The Book of Sarahs.