Women, Sisters and Friends

A landmark collection restoring Black luminary Kathleen Collins’s visionary plays and screenplays to their rightful place in American film and literature.

The writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins was a groundbreaking figure in the Black arts and literary cultures of the 1970s and 1980s, yet her work has only recently begun receiving the mainstream recognition it deserves. For the first time, Women, Sisters and Friends shares the plays and screenplays that were central to Collins’s creative practice, which illuminated Black women’s lives, artistic ambitions, intimacies, and losses with remarkable emotional depth. These evocative works reveal why Collins inspired contemporaries such as Toni Morrison and Julie Dash and paved the way for generations of Black feminist creators.

Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, this richly illustrated volume pairs Collins’s scripts with contextual essays, archival materials, and reflections from family members, collaborators, and fellow artists. Arriving amid a major revival of Collins’s work—with acclaimed volumes of her fiction, national film screenings, new stage productions, and renewed popular interest—Women, Sisters and Friends is both an essential act of restorative history and a vital contribution to American culture.

Samantha N. Sheppard is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, author and coeditor of four books, and Academy Film Scholar recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Hayley O’Malley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Program in Media Studies at Rice University and is completing her first book, Dreams of a Black Cinema. 

Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University, author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen, and coeditor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film.