Perhaps…I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman,

because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself—a

Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you

doing yours?

—Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”

When Akasha Gloria Hull heard the seminal poet Audre Lorde challenge her audience with these words at a Modern Language Association convention in the late 1970s, it gave her the chills.

She had been asking herself the same questions: “Why am I in the world? What am I put here to do?”

Already at the forefront of the small but burgeoning black feminist movement, Hull had accomplished a lot by her mid-30s.

She’d survived the Jim Crow racism of her native Shreveport, Louisiana in the ’50s and early ‘60s, and then escaped the South altogether with the help of various academic scholarships. She’d launched a career as a university professor and literary critic. She’d lent her powerful voice to the civil rights, black power and feminist movements. She’d even become a mother and written some poetry.

And yet Lorde’s words haunted her: Was she really doing her work?

This Saturday, Hull, who now lives in Monterey, will read from her poetry and from Loving Neicy Johnson, her novel-in-progress, at Bookworks in Pacific Grove as part of the monthly Whitney Latham Lechich Poetry Reading Series. Her novel is, Hull says, the story of “a black actress going through a lot of love, sex, sexuality, personal enlightenment—it’s not autobiographical, but it’s all me.”

Even as a young woman, Gloria Hull had dreamed of effecting change.

Growing up “very poor” in the segregated South, she had what she calls “the normal traumas with racism,” recalling incidents like getting run off the road by white cops.

In high school, she wrote for the Booker T. Washington Roaring Lion, her school newspaper, hoping to become a journalist.

“Everybody always told me that being smart in school would be my way out, and it was,” she remembers. “But the people that loved me couldn’t see my being a journalist. They knew what I’d be up against and the reality of their own situations had dimmed their vision.

“The highest thing they could hope for me to be was a school teacher. So instead I became a university professor.”

Hull earned a scholarship to Southern University, eventually receiving a doctorate in English from Purdue in 1972. She found herself a part of the academic establishment at a time when that establishment was being attacked. Before long, she was trying to transform academia from the inside.

“We were young academic rebels trying to get the establishment to change their notions of what was acceptable,” she says. “As critics and scholars we needed to change the way we wrote. We needed to bring a more distinct personal voice.”

As part of their struggle against elitism, Hull and her contemporaries forged alliances with women outside the academic world. At the forefront of their philosophy was the idea of being useful, “not just residing in an ivory tower.”

A major early influence was Alice Walker. “She was the first to teach a women’s studies course in literature (at Wellesley College) in the ‘70s, and a few of us followed suit,” Hull says.

While searching for African American women writers to introduce to her students, Walker discovered Zora Neale Hurston, a forgotten Harlem Renaissance writer, and edited an anthology of Hurston’s work. Hull was instrumental in seeing the book to print as a member of the Feminist Press Reprints Committee.

“We wanted to teach Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hull remembers, “but it wasn’t even in print! We were Xeroxing chunks of it and passing them around the country.”

Before long, Hull realized that the female black perspective needed to be brought into the academic kitchen and put on the front burner to boil.

“We had done civil rights, black power, we had gotten the feminist movement started, but civil rights was iconized by males and feminism was only for white women,” she recalls. “We weren’t there. What we needed was a particular vision that pulled together black and female perspectives.”

In the 1980s Hull helped found the field of Black Women’s Studies, publishing groundbreaking books and articles that discussed African American women—especially previously unrecognized authors—from a black and feminist perspective.

On the streets and in the universities, Hull sensed a new spirituality rising among African American women. Gradually, an idea of her mission began to take shape. “I wanted to reach a broader audience. I wanted to do things that expanded out of the academic arena. I wanted to be more creative,” she explains.

She concentrated on writing poems, “squeezing the words out of them, each one so precious,” but hid her work until she felt comfortable calling herself a poet.

“I was getting recognition through all of my research and writing,” she says. “I was a marvelous entrepreneur of other women’s talents, but it took me a while to claim my own creative, poetic talent.”

Hull received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon foundations, and spent two deeply satisfying years in Jamaica as a senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of the West Indies. But Lorde’s question continued to linger, driving her development as an artist forward.

As a professor of literature and women’s studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, she juggled her political, spiritual and creative identities, publishing a book of poems called Healing Heart while continuing to write, teach and consult.

“These identities fed me and got me recognized,” she explains. “But they also limited the perception I had of myself. I needed to integrate these different parts of myself somehow.”

Her strong feelings about the world, spirituality, and the need for social justice made her want to address those topics and feelings directly as a creative writer, but she admits to having “a difficult time seeing myself in that way.”

Widely respected by this time as an academic, a poet, and a political activist, Hull concentrated on erasing the boundaries of these separate identities and transforming herself into something new.

“I had set myself the task of not being schizophrenic,” she explains. “The creative writing is one person, the popular-focused spirituality work someone else, the scholarship another someone. Of course there’s a ‘me’ who’s all of that. I knew there was a way to be ‘one’ if I could meld it in myself and get all the parts of me to talk to each other.”

Hull had wanted to change her first name since the 1970s. “When everyone else was getting their African names, I guess I was just sitting around waiting for a wise old elder to place his hand on my head.” While in Ghana in 1992, she came across the name Akasha in a “spiritual, metaphysical” text and it resonated. She had her name officially changed when she returned to the United States.

Hull stopped teaching full-time in 2000 to focus more on writing. In 2001 she published Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African- American Women, her heartfelt examination of spirituality and creative force within her peer group.

An important and deeply affecting book, Soul Talk investigates how a multi-faceted spirituality fosters both personal healing and artistic brilliance while functioning as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice.

Painstakingly researched, but written in accessible, creative prose, Soul Talk features verbatim conversations with creative luminaries including Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez.

Finally, Hull could answer Lorde’s 25-year-old question with a triumphant “yes.” With Soul Talk, she had integrated her personal paradigm of creativity, politics, and spirituality into a single voice.

In the book’s introduction she writes, “When I set foot on the path toward realized spirituality around 1980, the desire that propelled me with ever-increasing urgency was the need to know my true work in this world…Without negating whatever of value I have done in the interim, I would say now that, for myself, Soul Talk has become a huge part of that answer.”

Today, Hull lives on a small ranch off Highway 68 with her partner. Fiercely intelligent and nattily dread-locked, she looks a full two decades younger than her 60 years and carries herself with the self-assurance of someone who is, finally, “doing her work.”

Since the publication of Soul Talk three years ago, she has continued to search for personal balance in her writing life. Although focused on writing her first novel, she has also been writing poetry, speaking publicly and consulting in areas of diversity and inclusion.

At this Saturday’s reading in Pacific Grove, she will introduce new work but also present earlier poems of family, blues, mother, racial ancestry, culture, friends and Jamaica. The novel excerpt she has chosen to read depicts her main character at a poetry reading, so in essence she will be describing a poetry reading at a poetry reading.

The process of creative writing has always been something of an enchanted process to Hull. Having never taken a formal writing class, she’s relied on her broad experience with literature and “an innate creative sense” to guide her stylistically.

“I think I tend to write poetry no matter what I’m writing. I’m pretty imagistic and have a lyrical way with words—my rhythm, tone, word choice, diction. I carry them with me.”

She deeply admires writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, people, she says, who “got out there and directly engaged the most egregious injustices and put themselves on the line in visceral, courageous, demanding ways.”

Hull looks back to earlier years, such as 1982 when she co-edited All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, a groundbreaking publication that received a National Institute of Women of Color award.

“That was one of the most exciting periods of my life,” she says, smiling. “United with others, zealous. We also had a lot of fun. We went on retreats, planned publications and wrote, let ourselves dream and play and fight. It was rich, turbulent, exciting. It was beautiful. We really changed the map, changed the face of things.”

Her smile fades and her jaw tenses when she adds, “But on the more distressing side of life, in many ways it’s all made very little difference. So much unconsciousness still exists. There is still so much we don’t have.”

Akasha Gloria Hull will read from her work Saturday, Jan. 31, at 7pm at Bookworks, 667 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove. For more information visit www.montereybaypoetry.com or call 251-0046.