Marita Golden’s best-selling books include the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons and Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex as well as the novels Long Distance Life, The Edge of Heaven and most recently After, which won the Fiction Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Fiction Award from  the  Association of Maryland Librarians.  Her most recent book is THE WORD Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing. She is the editor of the anthology It’s All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates Family and Friends. As a literary institution builder she co-founded both the African American Writers Guild and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She has taught writing in the Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University and served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of the District of Columbia.