Rosa Guy (Rosa Cuthbert Guy) Biography

African-American novelist, born in Trinidad; she grew up in Harlem, New York. After working in a clothing factory, she attended New York University and began writing through her involvement with the American Negro Theatre; her play Venetian Blind was produced in 1954. She was one of the founders of the Harlem Writers' Guild in 1950. Bird at My Window (1966), her first novel, forms an uncompromising treatment of the despair engendered by conditions in the Harlem ghetto in the 1950s. Her most highly regarded work is A Measure of Time (1983), which registers social developments from the 1920s onward in its story of a black woman who leaves the oppression of Alabama to seek new opportunities in New York. Also well known as a writer for children, Guy edited Children of Longing (1970), a collection of revealing interviews with African-American children during the civil rights crises of the 1960s. My Love, My Love: Or the Peasant Girl (1985) is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's tale ‘The Little Mermaid’ newly set in the Caribbean.