When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of sixty-three, 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, edited by Hilton Als on the occasion of the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, texts by Hilton Als, Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney 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. Each author speaks from a personal, informed perspective—through voices that are both imbued with Baldwin’s deeply personal, anguished, and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately, because we are human, we share the potential to love and connect.
With images of artwork by Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, and Larry Wolhandler
