Pearl Cleage

Pearl Cleage – Life, Work, and Vision

Explore the life of Pearl Cleage: acclaimed American novelist, playwright, poet, and cultural activist. Discover her biography, signature works, themes, and powerful reflections on race, gender, and resilience.

Introduction

Pearl Michelle Cleage (born December 7, 1948) is an American writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and social activist. Her career spans decades of creating narratives that center Black women, interrogate the intertwining of racism and sexism, and dramatize the struggles and hopes of communities often overlooked. Her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day achieved widespread recognition (including Oprah’s Book Club) and her plays like Flyin’ West and Blues for an Alabama Sky remain staples of contemporary theater. Cleage is also known as “Atlanta’s first Poet Laureate” and for a lifetime of engagement in activism, the arts, and community.

Early Life and Family

Pearl Cleage was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1948, the younger daughter of Doris (née Graham), an elementary school teacher, and Albert B. Cleage Jr., a minister and activist.

Her father, later known as Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, founded the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church (the Shrine of the Black Madonna) and was a significant voice in Black nationalism.

Because of political backlash against her father’s radical ideas, the family relocated to Detroit during her childhood.

Growing up, Cleage was immersed in a milieu of political discussion, church activism, and literary engagement. She observed how her father worked to articulate complex ideas for everyday listeners—an influence she later cited as foundational to her writing approach.

She attended Detroit Public Schools and graduated from Northwestern High School in 1966.

Youth, Education, and Early Career

In 1966, Cleage enrolled at Howard University, where she studied playwriting and had two one-act plays produced.

By 1969, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia — the city that would become central to her life and writing.

In Atlanta, she continued her education at Spelman College, completing a Bachelor of Arts in drama in 1971.

After graduating, she undertook graduate studies at Atlanta University.

Early in her Atlanta years, Cleage also held roles in media and politics: she worked as a host/interviewer, in communications for the City of Atlanta, and as press secretary for Mayor Maynard Jackson.

However, she sensed that writing from someone else’s voice constrained her—so she gradually shifted toward pursuing her own creative work.

Career and Major Works

Pearl Cleage’s career spans multiple literary forms: drama, novels, essays, poetry, and performance art. She has also been a cultural organizer, editor, and activist.

Theater & Plays

Cleage began writing plays in the early 1980s. Her early theatrical works include:

• Puppetplay (1981)

• Hospice (1983)

• Good News (1984), Essentials (1985)

• Flyin’ West (1992)

• Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995)

• Bourbon at the Border (1997)

• Chain (1992) — a solo performance play about addiction and agency.

Her plays are frequently produced across the U.S., taught in universities, and central to African American and feminist theater repertory.

She holds the title Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and she has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dramatists Guild.

Novels & Fiction

Cleage’s transition into novels began in the 1990s. Some of her major novels:

• What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) — her debut novel, selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and a New York Times bestseller for nine weeks.

  • The novel centers on Ava Johnson, a Black woman diagnosed with HIV, navigating relationships, community, and stigma.

• I Wish I Had a Red Dress (2001)

• Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do (2003)

• Babylon Sisters (2005)

• Baby Brother’s Blues (2006)

• Seen It All and Done the Rest (2008)

• Till You Hear From Me (2010)

• Just Wanna Testify (2011)

Her novels often overlap in character, setting, and themes, especially in Atlanta neighborhoods.

Essays, Poetry, and Nonfiction

Cleage has published essays and collections on social, cultural, and personal issues, including:

• Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth (1990)

• Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (1993)

• Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons and Love Affairs (2014) — a compilation of journal entries.

In poetry, she has works like Dear Dark Faces: Portraits of a People (1980) and One for the Brothers (1983).

She is also the founding editor of the literary magazine Catalyst (since 1987).

Themes, Style & Influence

Intersectionality and Voice

A signature of Cleage’s writing is the way she explores where racism and sexism meet — the lived experience of Black women navigating multiple, intersecting injustices.

She often frames her works in terms of “Free Womanhood,” a concept she introduced in a convocation speech at Spelman College. It affirms autonomy, self-love, and resistance against constraints.

Centering Community & Everyday Lives

Rather than focusing on famous figures or sweeping history, Cleage’s narratives often spotlight ordinary people in their quotidian struggles — love, betrayal, illness, family tension — showing how systemic forces shape private lives.

Her plays Flyin’ West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, and Bourbon at the Border share characters and themes across generational memory, trauma, and Black histories of migration. Critics often treat them as a thematic trilogy.

Her solo play Chain (1992) is a powerful, harrowing dramatization of a Black teenager chained by her family in response to drug addiction — a raw look at trauma, dignity, and survival.

Blending Art and Activism

Cleage has never separated her art from her activism. Her father’s ministry and radical politics shaped her belief in language as a tool for social change.

Her editorial work, public speaking, and involvement in AIDS advocacy, women’s rights, and racial justice are integral to her identity as a writer.

She has held roles in theater residencies, served as Playwright in Residence at the Alliance Theatre, and been deeply involved in nurturing Black theater communities.

Recognition & Legacy

• What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was an Oprah Book Club pick (1998) and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks.

• That novel won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Literary Award.

• Baby Brother’s Blues won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction (2007).

• In theater, Cleage has received multiple awards: in 1983 she won five AUDELCO Awards for her play Hospice.

• In recognition of her sustained body of work, she has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild.

• She is Atlanta’s first Poet Laureate.

• In 2023, the Goodman Theatre hosted a Pearl Cleage Fest, featuring productions of her plays, readings, and workshops — a sign of her enduring influence.

• She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021.

Selected Quotes

Though Pearl Cleage is less often quoted in popular media compared to novelists or public intellectuals, here are reflections and lines that capture her vision:

• “The purpose of my writing, often, is to express the point where racism and sexism meet.”

• About her own identity: “As a Black female writer … my writing of necessity reflects my blackness and my femaleness … this condition … gives me a unique perspective.”

Her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day includes lines that resonate with her thematic concerns; for instance, the struggle to claim dignity in the face of illness and stigma.

Lessons from Pearl Cleage

1. Speak from lived truths
   Cleage’s authority comes not from abstraction but from embedding her narratives in personal, community, and cultural realities.

2. Embrace multiplicity of forms
   She did not confine herself to one genre — drama, fiction, poetry, essays — allowing her ideas to reach diverse audiences.

3. Art and activism need not be separate
   She exemplifies how creators can maintain integrity while grappling with injustice, without losing artistry.

4. Center marginalized voices — especially women
   Her work models how to foreground those historically relegated to the margins, not only suffering but striving, resisting, loving.

5. Creativity sustained by community
   Her theatrical residencies, editorial work, collaborations, and mentorship show a belief that writing is part of larger communal work.

Conclusion

Pearl Cleage is a dynamic force in contemporary American letters: a storyteller, thinker, activist, and chronicler of Black womanhood. Through theater, fiction, essays, and performance, she challenges narratives of victimhood and silence. She insists on dignity, complexity, and truth — in public life and in private experience.