The Unforgetting Heart: An Anthology of Short Stories by African American Women

This collection brings together an unprecedented range of beautifully crafted short stories by women that span a century and a half of African American literary tradition. Editor Asha Kanwar’s introduction provides historical background and context for the selection of stories by authors as varied as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, and Wanda Coleman. The writers included here, both the famous and the less well-known, together represent the remarkable diversity of African American women’s writing across class, culture, and time.

The Unforgetting Heart: What an appropriate title! What a stunning collection! These unforgettable stories--from laundry room to ballroom, from Brooklyn to Barbados, from colored folks to African Americans--will sweep into your life with all the variety, verve, intellect and heart of the women who produced them. -- Tina McElroy Ansa, author of Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways

The Unforgetting Heart...will make you laugh, bring tears to your eyes and touch the very depths of your souls. Most of all, The Unforgetting Heart will capture yours. -- Johnetta B. Cole, President, Spelman College

Often touted as great oral storytellers, African American women have nonetheless been ignored as short story writers. The Unforgetting Heart is a lively historical sampling that will challenge readers, teachers and scholarly views of African American women’s contributions to cultural/literary history. -- Barbara Christian, author of Black Feminist Criticism and Black Women Novelists, Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley

This anthology will be a rewarding addition for women’s studies collections, as a resource for new discoveries and old favorites. -- Booklist

Asha Kanwar has collected some of the best Black female writers of all time, adding to that voices buried under years of neglect. All of them shimmer with a new radiance, and an immediate intimacy...a rare jewel. Its time has come indeed. -- Seattle Gay News

Asha Kanwar is an Indian woman who lives in New Delhi where she teaches English at the Indira Gandhi National Open University. After a traditionally arranged marriage at eighteen, she continued her education mainly supported by various scholarships. A British Council grant enabled her to obtain her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, England, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on British Marxism and the nineteenth century novel. Asha received a Fulbright fellowship in 1992 for research on fiction by African American women writers which she conducted during her tenure at the English Department at Iowa State University.

Asha is the author of two critical books entitled The Novels of Virginia Woolf and Anite Desai (New Delhi: Prestige, 1989) and Fictional Theories and Three Great Novels (New Delhi: Prestige, 1990). She has translated Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Matigari into Hindi (New Delhi: Atma Ram, 1991). She plans to translate stories from The Unforgetting Heart into Hindi, so that readers in India, especially Dalits, will have access to the expressions of a people whose resistance is similar to their own.