Literature / Theatre & dance / Civil rights & activism
Pearl Cleage
born 1948
· playwright, novelist, essayist, poet
Atlanta playwright and Oprah-picked novelist who grew up in Detroit as the daughter of the Rev. Albert Cleage, founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna.
- Born
Springfield, Massachusetts
age 77- Birth name
- Pearl Michelle Cleage
- Detroit years
- 1950s–1966
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Cleage was a small child when her family moved to Detroit, where her father, the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., became one of the city's most influential Black nationalist ministers and later founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. Growing up in that household, she listened to writers and activists speaking at her father's church and met civil rights leaders who stopped at the house on their way to rallies, experiences that shaped her as a writer. She graduated from Northwestern High School in 1966, then studied playwriting at Howard University and settled in Atlanta. Her plays, including Flyin' West and Blues for an Alabama Sky, and her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, an Oprah's Book Club pick, made her one of the best-known Black women writers of her generation.
Highlights
- Plays Flyin' West (1992) and Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995)
- What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997), an Oprah's Book Club selection
- Playwright in residence at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre
- Northwestern High School graduate, Detroit (1966)
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 2
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1960s–1966
Northwestern High School
She graduated from this Detroit public high school in 1966.
Related place · 1950s–1960s
Shrine of the Black Madonna
Her father's church on Linwood, where she heard writers and activists speak as a girl; it became the Shrine of the Black Madonna in 1967.