Forty-two years after publishing her first memoir, “Migrations of the Heart,” Marita Golden has built a respected and lauded career. However, for the award-winning writer, it’s not accolades that keep her going, but the influence her work has on others.
“The most satisfying thing about being a writer is it’s given me a way into the hearts and minds of so many people,” Golden told The Informer.
For 35 years, Golden has provided support, resources and community for thousands of Black writers across multiple continents, through the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright (Hurston/Wright) Foundation, which she co-founded with businessman and cultural activist Clyde McElvene to honor and recognize storytellers across the African diaspora.
On Oct. 17, the foundation will use its annual Legacy Awards to celebrate literary changemakers, including two-time Pulitzer-winning historian David Levering Lewis; writer, lawyer and activist Mary Frances Berry; and scholar and cultural advocate Brenda M. Greene.
As she prepares to celebrate her company’s 35-year mark, author Marita Golden reflects on her literary background and upbringing in D.C., where she was raised in the same neighborhood that celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer grew up in decades earlier. (Courtesy of Marita Golden)
“We call it the Legacy Award because every year, that’s what we’re honoring. We’re honoring the legacy of Hurston and Wright,” Golden said. “We’re honoring the legacy that all Black writers are part of, because every time a Black writer writes a book, they’re part of the legacy.”
As the foundation celebrates 35 years, others are celebrating Golden’s major contributions and literary legacy.
“Marita is a pioneer,” McElvene said of his fellow Hurston/Wright co-founder. “She recognized that there was a need to be filled, and she started an institution that will live on.”
D.C. Native Born to Write
Born Bernette Marita Golden in 1950, in what is now the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., it seemed, almost from the start, that the novelist and founder of the Hurston Wright Foundation was destined to write.
She grew up on Harvard Street NW — the same street where Jean Toomer, best known as a Harlem Renaissance writer, was raised decades earlier.
Her father, Francis Sherman Golden, regaled her with stories about Black history makers like Shirley Chisolm and Frederick Douglass each night before bed.
“I was very lucky to be raised in a home by two parents who took me very seriously,” Golden said.
In her latest memoir, “How to Become a Black Writer” (2025), Golden recounts her parents’ influence.
“My father made stories an important part of my life,” Golden recounts in her memoir, which was released in February.
However, it was her mother, Beatrice Lee Reid, who told a 12-year-old Golden, “One day, you’re going to write a book,” as they made biscuits for dinner one evening.
Coming of age during the 1960s and 1970s, and witnessing massive political and social upheaval changed the course of her life and shaped her young career.
She attended a newly integrated Western High School and later went to American University on a scholarship named after Frederick Douglass.
“We had graduated high school as Negroes and entered American University as Black people,” she said, recalling the almost immediate shift in African American identity after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
All the while, she wrote for both school papers, chronicling the current events.
“Everything we’re going through 1760584379 — the criminalization of thought, the criminalization of speech, the war on Black people and creativity — we’ve been through that again and again. The new wrinkle is the creeping authoritarianism,” she said, before charging other storytellers to continue contributing to the world the best way they can. “I think the role of the writer now is what it’s always been. To be a witness, to ask tough questions, to heal.”
The Writer Creates New Chapters
The D.C. native also attended the journalism school at Columbia University in New York City, where her creative life thrived.
“I was young, gifted, and Black in New York City,” she said, recalling: dancing with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela; listening to June Jordan and Audre Lorde read poetry at the famed Michaux’s Bookstore; and working as a freelance writer for Essence Magazine in the early days, interviewing icons like Toni Morrison and writing pieces about controversial issues like feminism and rape.
Golden’s life was full.
She moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where she lived and wrote for four years with her husband and son. She began working on a memoir as her marriage was ending and returned to the states to reinvent herself.
While juggling life as a wife and mother, Golden would go on to author 23 works of fiction and non-fiction, taking her middle name “Marita” as her writer’s name in the process.
For more than three decades, Golden has been dedicated to uplifting Black writers through Hurston/Wright.
McElvene, a bibliophile who handled the day-to-day operations of the foundation until he stepped down as chief executive officer in 2013, said her determination is about more than her passion for Black literature.
“She’s committed to Black people,” he said. “She’s committed to us.”
Creating Family Through Literary Bonds
Community is at the core of Golden’s work– writing about it, creating it, nurturing it and connecting other writers to it.
“Because both of my parents died before I was in my early 20s, it was important for me to find a way to create family,” she told The Informer.
She began reaching out to other women writers and developing lasting bonds.
“At pivotal points in my life, sisterhood with Black women has been crucial,” she said, likening her “sister circles” to a tradition among Black women of gathering and supporting each other socially and politically.
What began as a personal need has blossomed into Golden mentoring other writers, like Dr. DeMaris B. Hill, a poet and creative scholar who was awarded a 2003 Hurston/Wright college award for fiction.
“I was extremely insecure as a writer,” Hill recalled. “That ceremony was my public coming out that I was a writer.”
Winning the award also came with gaining a writing community that included Golden, who invited Hill to her house for writing workshops and became her mentor.
“She was the first person who said very clearly, if I don’t make time for my art, I won’t have it,” Hill explained. “She spoke to me earnestly and it really changed my perspective and approach to my work.”
Celebrating a Mentor, Writer, ‘Soul Worker‘
Golden is passionate about teaching and uplifting other writers.
“I like to call that soul work,” she told The Informer.
Taking one of the writer’s free workshops 20 years ago was the beginning of a long relationship turned friendship between Golden and Tracy Chiles McGee, an award-winning author and cultural curator.
“She’s a great writer, she’s a great teacher, and she believes in community,” said Chiles McGee, who Golden calls her literary daughter. “She shows up for writers and she taught me to show up for writers, too.”
Further, Golden has been locally and widely celebrated for her contributions, including in 2023, when Dec. 7 was officially declared Marita Golden Day in D.C. and in Prince George’s County, where the writer lives.
“That day,” Golden said, “confirmed that I had both designed and found the community I yearned for.”
As she approaches this year’s Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, Golden is celebrating the success of the community she’s helped create over the past 35 years, uplifting the foundation’s namesakes, and working to bolster Black writers of today.
“After 35 years, we’re here because of the commitment of so many people who believe in what we’re doing,” Golden explained. “I think sometimes an idea can be so strong that it can be almost indestructible. And I think that this idea is one of those – honoring [Hurston and Wright] and creating an environment in which Black writers are recognized.”
While celebrating the milestone anniversary, Golden is also looking toward the future of Hurston/Wright.
“What’s next for us is responding to this new environment,” she said,” and creating ways to sustain and grow the work we do.”
Source: Washington Informer
