Lovers. Lovers who meet at Civil Rights Conferences, sit-ins, church rallies, art galleries. Lovers who send letters back and forth from maximum security prison. Lovers with dislocated jaws. Lovers who lose themselves or shoot themselves. Lovers who let go too soon. Love that is colour free. Love that makes men cry. Love that defies the strictures of race and class. In prose that slips between lush sensuality and electric melancholy, Kathleen Collins has gifted us a universe of lovers. Of poets and freedom riders struggling to get through hot lonely summers, spending night and day in dingy New York apartments. A universe of young women who step outside of their father's homes, grow their hair wild and discover sex. Of young men whose daredevil antics disguises an abiding sadness. Though Collins is now regarded as a pioneering African-American filmmaker and dramatist, her work was largely overlooked in her lifetime and her stories were never published. Collected here for the first time, almost twenty years after the author's death, the stories in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? reveal a voice that - though it remained unheard for so long - is vital, erotic, compelling.

Author Biography

Born in New Jersey in 1942, KATHLEEN COLLINS was an activist with SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement who went on to carve out a career for herself as a playwright and filmmaker during a time when black women were rarely seen in those roles. Though she is now considered a pioneer, Collins's work was overlooked and forgotten till 2015 when her film Losing Ground premiered at the Lincoln Center as part of a series on African-American filmmakers, and was hailed as a masterpiece. She died in 1988, aged just 46.