Looking for Lorraine

The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

By: Imani Perry

Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.

A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction

A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist

Happy to have found this

I appreciate that Imani Perry was curious enough about Lorraines life to study her story and provide it to the rest of us who are looking for connection to our past. My ancestors didn't speak much of the racism and slights they encountered in the MS delta. I am grateful.
The narrator is okay. Her voice has lilt that makes it go under and down as if wind was coming out of a sail.

A must read

Do your ears a favor and challenge your thinking. Listen intently to this book you will be glad that you did! I know I am. I learned and I am grateful for the author but more so for the life of Lorraine.

Exquisite!

A lovely, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a stunning & courageous human being, ahead of her time. Lorraine was a worthy member of radical royalty.

Extraordinary book and exquisitely narrated

I will never forget this book. I loved Lorraine Hansberry ever since I was a child dreaming of becoming a writer. This book gave me so much more to love. What an incredible human, artist, and activist she was. This book touched me in such a real way, I had such deep grief in the chapter about her illness and passing, becoming among the mourners of someone I have known to be deceased as long as I’ve known her name. Imani Perry renders her with such aliveness and love that I was taken fully through her life and brought to that grief and then also the inspiration to pick up my pen and write in honor of Ancestor Hansberry. This was a pleasure to read and learn from. I’ll be thinking about this book for quite some time.

The Depth of Lorraine

Wow…who knew? What a woman and story of a life. Thank you, Ms. Perry!