Flyin’ West (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Pearl Cleage (pronounced “cleg”) was born December 7, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Doris and Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr. She was reared in Detroit, where her father’s ministry allowed her to hear speakers such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Cleage graduated from high school and, during the turbulent 1960s, went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she stayed for three years. She went to Yale University in 1969, then the University of the West Indies in 1971, and finally transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta, where she graduated in 1971 with a degree in drama. She also did graduate work at Atlanta University.

In 1969, Cleage married Michael Lomax, a politician. The marriage lasted ten years and produced a daughter named Deignan. Cleage remarried in 1994. Her second husband, Zaron Burnett, Jr., is a writer and producing director of Just Us Theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia, where the couple met. Cleage was the theater’s first playwright-in-residence, and she and Burnett collaborated on several works after she became the artistic director in 1987. Another Atlanta theater, The Alliance Theater, is responsible for debuting some of Cleage’s most notable plays. Among these is Flyin’ West(1992), the play credited with gaining Cleage a widespread audience. The success of this play led to the production of Blues for an Alabama Sky in 1995.

Cleage is regarded as an important contemporary African-American writer and feminist. Her work includes plays, poetry, essays, and novels. She has contributed to magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and she is the founding editor of the literary magazine Catalyst. Her work is unique in that it portrays an overlooked chapter in history, the migration of black women to the West. She also addresses modern issues such as racism, sexism, and AIDS. In her first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Cleage depicts the life of a modern African-American woman struggling with her positive HIV status. When this novel was selected for talk-show host Oprah Winfrey’s book club, Cleage reached a wide and diverse audience. The book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for almost ten weeks in 1998, and Cleage’s writing in general attracted a great deal of interest. Today, Cleage continues to write fiction, essays, poetry, and drama from her home in Atlanta.