catherine mckinley
In 1995, Catherine McKinley edited Afrekete, a beautiful and groundbreaking anthology of writings by black lesbian women. In 2002, her memoir, The Book of Sarahs, which details her experience growing up in a small New England town as one of less than 10,000 black children adopted by white families in the 1960s and 1970s and her subsequent search for her black and Jewish birth families. McKinley's story challenges thinking about race, identity, loyalty, family and love. Her experiences writing enhance her already powerful speaking about issues of adoption, race, class, and sexuality.
Catherine is Associate Director of the Publishing Certificate Program at City College of New York and teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is the recipient of numerous other awards, including an Audre Lorde Estate grant, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Award. She is currently at work on a creative nonfiction project about women and the indigo trade in West Africa.
She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
