Anita Cornwell, the Philadelphia journalist and essayist who published the first collection of essays by an out Black lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America, died on May 27, 2023.
Born September 23, 1923, in Greenwood, South Carolina, Cornwell moved to Philadelphia and studied journalism at Temple University, graduating in 1948. She worked as a journalist for The Philadelphia Tribune, and by the 1950s was contributing essays and poetry to The Ladder and The Negro Digest, becoming the first Black woman writer to publicly identify as a lesbian in print. She later published in Feminist Review, Labyrinth, Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians, and BLACK/OUT, and in 1975 interviewed Audre Lorde in a conversation later published in Sinister Wisdom. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis and, in 1971, helped found the Philadelphia chapter of Radicalesbians.
Black Lesbian in White America (1983) collected essays on becoming a lesbian and an activist, drawn from lives lived in the 1950s at a time when most women in them weren’t out. It was published by Naiad Press and is recognized as the first essay collection by a Black lesbian.
Cornwell also published the young-adult novel The Girls of Summer (New Seed Press, 1989).
Complete Bibliography
Nonfiction: Black Lesbian in White America (1983)
Novels: The Girls of Summer (1989)
Anita Cornwell died on May 27, 2023, at Wesley Enhanced Living at Stapeley in Germantown, Philadelphia. She was 99.
Photography by Janet Mason, Sinister Wisdom.