Paule Marshall

Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke to parents who had recently immigrated to New York from Barbados, and was raised in a close-knit West Indian community." West Indian dialect and culture are prominent in Marshall's writing, as are the conflicts that face Caribbean-American immigrant families like her own. Illness had forced her to take a two-year break in the middle of college; during that period she began writing fiction to relieve her boredom.