20 Facts About Marita Bonner

Marita Bonner, known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner.

Marita Bonner attended Brookline High School, where she contributed to the school magazine, The Sagamore.

Marita Bonner excelled in German and Music, and was a very talented pianist.

Marita Bonner was an accomplished student at Radcliffe, founding the Radcliffe chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority, and participating in many musical clubs.

Marita Bonner was accepted to a competitive writing class that was open to 16 students, where her professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged her not to be "bitter" when writing, a descriptor often used for authors of color.

Marita Bonner began teaching again in the 1940s and finally retired in 1963.

Marita Bonner died on December 7,1971, from smoke-inhalation complications at a hospital after her apartment caught fire.

Marita Bonner regularly discussed poverty, familial relations, urban living, colorism, feminism, and racism in her works.

Marita Bonner often wrote about multi-ethnic communities, such as in "Nothing New".

Marita Bonner was wholly opposed to generalizations of black experience, and wrote about several differing black experiences in her short stories and plays.

Marita Bonner is thus remembered as an advocate for intersectionality and a documentarian of multicultural urban life.

Marita Bonner contributed a variety of things to the Harlem Renaissance.

Marita Bonner's writings addressed the struggles of people who lived outside of Harlem.

Marita Bonner encouraged African Americans to use the weapons of knowledge, teaching, and writing to overcome inequalities.

Marita Bonner's works focused on the historical specificity of her time and place rather than the universality of an idealized African past.

Marita Bonner describes it as a "group within a group", and discusses the frustrations that come with expressing anger not only as a woman, but as a black woman - she is doubly expected to express her anger with her own oppression "gently and quietly", once from white society and once more from black male society.

Marita Bonner is one of many writers whose efforts to discuss intersectionality have been dismissed, forgotten or largely eradicated from modern canon.

In more recent years, critical exploration of Marita Bonner has noticeably diminished, having been at its peak in the late 1980s.

In 2017, Marita Bonner was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.