God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

When James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work. Novels, poems, film scripts, and, perhaps most indelibly, essays constituted the great artist's writing, which was not divisible from his work and subsequent fame as a civil rights activist. A friend to and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was the voice of a movement-a voice that struggled after his early recognition as a creator to retain the author's "I," while taking on the "We" of his people.In God Made My Face, published on the centenary of Baldwin's birth, the assembled authors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and filmmaker and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, create a kind of mosaic, one that not only mirror's Baldwin's various voices but examines, closely, his sui generis contributions to cinema, theater, the essay, and Black American critical studies-including queerness. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective-through voices that are both informed by Baldwin's deeply personal, anguished, and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately, because we are human, we share the potential to love, connect, and live together in all our glory.