Toni Cade Bambara (1981)

Short story writer and novelist Toni Cade Bambara won the National Book Award for The Salt Eaters and was a City College alumnus. Bambara’s two collections of short stories, Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, acclaimed for their “contemporaneity… their variety, and their daring to examine previously unexplored aspects of Black women’s lives,” reflect her personal commitment to confronting society’s ills. Bambara asserted that “the job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible,” and her decades of activism reflected this aim. Bambara helped shape the Black Arts and Black feminist literary scenes, and addressed such tragedies as the Philadelphia police bombing of the community justice group MOVE’s headquarters, which she eulogized in The Bombing of Osage Avenue.