This article on Paulette Childress White (1948–) is published in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (2007). White is an American poet from Michigan. She stated in Contemporary Authors Online 2002: “I write from a sense of irony, because I want to make sense of my experience of life. I am also a painter. I write and paint because I have a need to give substance to my ideas, feelings, and experiences, and because I believe it is good and important work.”

Lotus Press, a non-profit literary organization, still publishes both of White’s major works of poetry—Love Poem to a Black Junkie (1975) and The Watermelon Dress: Portrait of a Woman (1983). White’s short story, “Getting the Facts of Life” (1989) was anthologized in three different publications from 1991-1993.

This article, published in African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs (2020), gives an overview of womanism as a social theory developed by African and African American women. The theory critiques all forms of oppression (racism, classism, and sexism). Becoming popular in the 1980s, womanism grew out of a dissatisfaction with the white feminist movement’s focus on Eurocentric ideals and strict gender-based oppression, and the exclusion of men.

This article, published in Contemporary Literary Criticism (2014), is a biographical overview of the contemporary American poet, Sharon Olds, as well as a thematic overview of her poetry collections. I am named as the Volume Advisor, and I wrote the overview.