Epicurean of the Heart: In Memory of Shay Youngblood

By E.R. Anderson, on behalf of Charis Books and More, and Charis Circle

Shay Youngblood, novelist, playwright, artist, and poet, died on Tuesday, June 11, 2024, after an extended illness. She was surrounded by loved ones sending her to meet the ancestors. In the days since Shay has gone from this Earth, our Charis community has been longing for her to come back, and has sought sustenance in her words and in the words of all those whose lives she touched.

Shay Youngblood was an epicurean of the heart, a writer’s writer, a generous gift-giver, a marvelous cook, and a cheerleader for everyone’s wildest dreams. Shay got her start at Charis Books and More in Atlanta, Georgia (now located in Decatur, Georgia), at the Charis Circle Young Women Writers Group.

“The first evening Mama doesn’t come back, I make a sandwich with leaves from her goodbye letter.
I want to eat her words.”

We are fortunate that we got to witness and celebrate the entire trajectory of her writing career that went from her first, pre-publication poetry reading at Charis Books and More in 1980 all the way to her picture book release in 2023, A Family Prayer. Charis Books and More cofounder, Linda Bryant, shared a memory of a then 20-year-old Shay hanging around Charis. Once they got to know each other a bit, Linda asked Shay what she wanted to do in her life. Shay said that she was writing poems. Before long, Linda convinced her to do a reading of her poems called “Ticket to Paris.” Shay was terrified but thrilled. When the day of the reading came, she called the store and told Linda that she was not feeling well, trying to back out. Linda said, “Well, that’s too bad because the store is filling up with people excited to hear your words. If you think you can make it, you need to come on down here.” And thus, she did, and her career as a public writer was born. 

Throughout the 1980s, Shay worked off and on at Charis. She always knew that she could travel, and she would have a job to come home to as well as a place to crash, if needed, at Linda’s house. That freedom allowed her to explore herself as a young writer. She had often lamented how hard it is for young people today to live the kind of free life that she lived when she was young.  Just a few years later, Nancy Bereano at Firebrand Books published Shay’s first book, Big Mama Stories (1989); and they distributed it nationally to mostly feminist and gay bookstores. Charis hosted the launch party. Big Mama Stories would go on to become a play and an invocation for Shay. Everywhere she went, people naturally told her their own big mama stories, smiling as they talked about the women who stepped in when their mothers were gone too soon, or simply needed another set of hands. Shay listened, often reaching out to hold their hands or to laugh as deeply as the teller of a family anecdote. Shay gave her entire attention to whoever was in front of her. Just as she loved to travel, sampling foods and experiences, to view beautiful art, and to touch interesting fabrics, she loved to drink in the humble and incredible stories of people she encountered in the world and at her readings.

That hunger and desire for food, for love, for joy, for art, for travel, and for experience is woven throughout every one of her works. When she published her next two novels, Soul Kiss (1997), and Black Girl and Paris (2000), with the major publisher, Riverhead Books, reviewers compared her work to Maya Angelou and to James Baldwin. They talked about the sensuousness of the prose. During these years, she visited the Charis Young Women’s Writing Group often, mentoring teen writers, including Alexis Pauline Gumbs and E.R. Anderson. She offered lifelong feedback on writing projects and advice on life in general. 

Her plays, Shaking the Mess Outta Misery, Talking Bones, Amazing Grace, and most recently, Square Blues, were each developed and initially performed at the Horizon Theatre Company of Little 5 Points under the leadership of Lisa Adler. Along with Charis, Horizon Theatre Company was one of Shay’s other Atlanta artistic homes. She served on the board of Yaddo artist’s colony for many years. She credited Yaddo and its people for offering her artistic sanctuary throughout various periods of her life. There, she befriended artists and writers too numerous to name. 

“My thirst is endless; the well has no bottom; but there is love all around me. I am sure of it now.”

As her travels took her to Japan and to other destinations, she became interested in bookmaking as an art form, and also in visual art and painting as a way to speak to the unspoken. Even when she was very ill, she would take Lyfts to the High Museum of Art in midtown Atlanta to simply be amidst the art as much as possible. In her last days, she was still painting with watercolors and exploring her senses. 

Shay Youngblood’s 1997 novel, Soul Kiss, begins with these sentences: “The first evening Mama doesn’t come back, I make a sandwich with leaves from her goodbye letter. I want to eat her words.” Soul Kiss ends with a narrator who is not completely grown, yet who has done a lot of living in a short period of time. Shay herself did more living than most people do in twice the years. The last line of the novel is a kind of grace for the narrator, for us, and for Shay:
“My thirst is endless; the well has no bottom; but there is love all around me. I am sure of it now.”

See also:

Remembering Shay Youngblood, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Charis Books and More

Listen to “Shay” by Daniel Alexander Jones