Delores Phillips

Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim, little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. Indeed, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was “weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write.” This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips’s only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist but also a poet and short story writer as well. Just as Alice Walker’s recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as “a genius of the South,” Stumbling Blocks illuminates and expands the legacy of an underrepresented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips’s sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris.

Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim, little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. Indeed, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was “weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write.” This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips’s only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist but also a poet and short story writer as well. Just as Alice Walker’s recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as “a genius of the South,” Stumbling Blocks illuminates and expands the legacy of an underrepresented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips’s sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris.

A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with an introduction by Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), an excerpt from the never before seen follow-up, and discussion guide. Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at "the farmhouse" on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle's grasp without ruinous--even fatal--consequences?