She comes from a family of readers; her mother was a historian before emigrating to the United States and often took Edim and her younger brothers to the library, where they would stock up on books. That's where she discovered Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
"I remember my first book report on Maya Angelou. I had an A.P. English teacher really critique her and be like, 'She's not a good writer,'" Edim recalled, "He was looking at syntax, he was looking at grammar, he was looking at her completely different structure." But these weren't the elements that appealed to Edim. She was drawn in by Angelou's descriptions of her relationship with her brother, which reminded Edim of her own, and said Angelou "changed my thinking about literature, who can write and whose voice is important."
COMMENT
Many years after finding Maya Angelou in the library, Glory Edim founded Well-Read Black Girl, a book club to read black women authors. If it had been up to her A.P. English teacher, though, she might never have discovered Angelou. In fact, the teacher's overt dislike of Angelou's writing demonstrates why diversity in collections is so important.These days there are MFA programs for people who want to be writers, in effect creating new rules about who can write and whose voice is important. Angelou never went to college. She made herself into a writer by using the language she heard in her community.
Angelou's writing is notable for using patterns of African-American English, though she herself rejected the idea that Black vernacular (a.k.a. Ebonics) should be considered a separate language. Angelou saw language as a tool of power and believed that learning Standardized English was a way for Black people to get access to power. Nonetheless, as Edim says, writers like Angelou change the rules of power by redefining who can be a writer.
Librarians have a challenge to find up-and-coming writers who are outside of the approval-plan. A few years ago I started hearing buzz about a young Somali-British poet named Warsan Shire. The humanities librarian refused to purchase her obscure books for the library collection, so I requested a purchase for my own use in order to sneak her books into the collection. Not long afterwords, Beyoncé used Shire's poetry in her album Lemonade. We librarians like to talk about diversity, but we also need to pay attention to what diverse communities are reading and be ready to spend money on it. In a way, it seems too bad that a well-read Black girl like Glory Edim is not a librarian.
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