Mary's World

It was a bit of a Bacchanal last night during the karaoke and people were dragging a little this morning when coming into the Keynote. We were so very happy to be able to have anyone of the stature of this year's speaker. I was honored to be able to introduce her and I'm including here what I said:

We are honored to have Jewelle Gomez as the keynote speaker for the Eighth Annual GCLS Literary Conference. Author, poet, playwright and activist, she was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts but resides now in San Francisco, California. Jewelle has been the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two California Arts Council fellowships and an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

She is the author of the award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories, which won the Lambda Book Award for both Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Science Fiction in 1992. It follows the life of an African-American lesbian vampire through the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, among them: The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Village Voice; Ms Magazine, ESSENCE Magazine, The Advocate, and Black Scholar. Anthologies have included Home Girls, Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Swords of the Rainbow, The Best Lesbian Erotica of 1997 and Dark Matter.

Her other publications include three collections of poetry -- The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears and Oral Tradition. She is also the author of a book of essays called Forty-Three Septembers and a collection of short fiction, Don’t Explain. She has written a play based on the life of James Baldwin, entitled Waiting 4 Giovanni.

Jewelle is currently at work on a second volume of Gilda stories. She works as the Director of Grants & Community Initiatives at Horizon’s Foundation.

She went beyond all my expectations, talking about the the history of the movement and the power in our reclaiming myths and the history of women writing. She left us with the exhortation to be sure and leave signs of our struggle.

As usual, the membership meeting ran overlong and the directors had to cut down their remarks. We were also unable to take questions, something I definitely regret. We did manage to pass the one issue--past Board members who served at least two years and left the Board in good standing are now entitled to a 50% discount on the price of the ticket to the conference. The Board will define what 'in good standing' means and will also determine if this will be a lifetime amount or equal to the number of years of service the Board member gave; ie someone who served for 7 years would be able to have 7 conferences at the rate.

The silent auction had a flurry of activity around 2pm and we were able to raise a good bit of money from the proceeds. Following that, we all headed to our rooms to prepare for the awards ceremony. My next post will be a list of the Goldie Award winners. Follow this like to see who are the finalists: http://www.goldencrown.org/Default.aspx?pageId=1277881