Wanda M Coleman

Ostinato Vamps

Imagoes

Imagoes

Imagoes

Mad Dog Black Lady

Mad Dog Black Lady

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986

A War of Eyes and Other Stories

The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry

There’s plenty of love between Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus, but it has an edge: every kiss, every snuggle, every touch is political. How to make a marriage work under the unyielding pressures of racial bigotry and cultural bias? How to maintain their creativity and independence as poets and arti...

Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Coleman says that th...

Mambo Hips and Make Believe

Fiction. Wanda Coleman's powerful new novel chronicles the friendship between two women -- one from the black ghetto of Los Angeles, one from its white middle-class suburbs. Both are aspiring writers, both scramble to pay their bills by pickup jobs like waitressing and editing pulp magazines. For tw...

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986

Poet Wanda Coleman provides a how-to manual, revealing some immediate ways not only to "fix a bad man hex" or "do dirty better," but to keep one's dream-light burning amid the aching rush of dark and anxious times.These poems and stories reflect the daily struggles of a poet-performer whose fight to...

Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales: New Stories (A Black Sparrow Book)

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. With this collection of thirteen new short stories, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of 'Lush Life' by Billy Strayh...

The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors

In this, her second collection of nonfiction prose, Wanda Coleman continues the project she began in Native in a Strange Land (1996), a project she once described as "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through scattered fragments of my living memory." It is a...

A War of Eyes and Other Stories

In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Wanda Coleman, a poet who grew up in the Watts area of Los Angeles, turns a baleful eye on lives that "mainstream" America wishes would somehow go away: She chronicles the not-so-quiet desperation of the poor and black urban dweller and gives voice ...

The World Falls Away (Pitt Poetry Series)

The burnings from which Coleman culls her work casts a glow and unique warmth that invites the reader to sit by her metaphorical hearth, to laugh and enjoy their “conversation.” The contemplative and philosophical have entered her voice as she continues to explore the conflicts and confusions that s...