Author Works: Alice Randall

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“Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black.” - Alice Randall

Singular both in style and in the sweeping story it tells, Alice Randall’s kaleidoscopic novel, Black Bottom Saints is a celebration of African American life, culture and achievement as refracted through the prism of a famed Detroit neighborhood during its decades of glory. 

In the mid-twentieth century Detroit’s Black Bottom was a vibrant Black neighborhood that rivaled New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville in terms of importance to Black arts, Black labor movements, Black politics, Black fashion, and Black sports. The first Black poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hayden rose from Black Bottom. Boxer Joe Louis, sports’ first international Black sport superstar; Charlotte Ruth Ellis a pioneering GLTBQ activist; and Lloyd George Richards, Dean of the Yale school of Drama who produced and directed August Wilson—all rose from Black Bottom. Black Bottom insists that crimes perpetuated on you don’t get to define you—you define you.

Alice Randall is the Harvard-educated author of novels, including The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada's Rules. An award-winning songwriter, she co-wrote the #1 hit XXX’s and OOO’s which celebrates Aretha Franklin. With her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, she co-authored the acclaimed cookbook Soul Food Love which won the NAACP Image award and the young adult novel The Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess, which received the Phillis Wheatley Award. A Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, Randall teaches courses on soul food, African-American children's literature, and African-American film. A native of Detroit, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

In partnership with Prince George's County Memorial Library System and Charles County Public Library.  

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