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Rosa Cuthbert Guy () (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer and activist who grew up in the New York metropolitan area. Her family had immigrated and she was orphaned when young. Raised in foster homes, she later was acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people that stressed supportive relationships.
Guy lived and worked in New York City, where she was among the founders of the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950. It was highly influential in encouraging African-American writers to gain publication and had a high rate of success. Guy died of cancer on June 3, 2012.
When their father died in 1937, the orphaned girls were taken into the welfare system and lived in Foster care homes. Rosa left school at the age of 14 and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister.
After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son. Five years later she and her husband divorced, in 1946, and she returned to New York City.
Guy also belonged to On Guard for Freedom, a Black nationalist literary organization founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Other members included Amiri Baraka, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. On Guard was active in the political realm, supporting Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba and protesting the United States-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion at Cuba. Following Lumumba's assassination, Guy was a notable participant a group of African-American activists, including Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach and Maya Angelou, who burst into a United Nations Security Council meeting in protest on February 15, 1961. (Lincoln, Angelou and Guy had had a prior meeting with Malcolm X at the Shabazz Restaurant in Harlem to solicit his opinion, and he had "let them know that he was impressed by their activism against the global imperialism of Belgium and the United States".)
She also contributed to such publications as the African-American journal Freedomways.Quoted by C. L. R. James, "Black Sansculottes" (October 1964), in At the Rendezvous of Victory, London: Allison & Busby, 1984, p. 162. Two stories by Guy, "Magnify" and "Carnival", appeared in the Trinidad newspaper The Nation in 1965. The following year, her first novel, Bird at My Window, was published. Attending the first World Festival of Black Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966, Guy was reported as "a striking figure ... playing hookey while her first book, Bird at My Window, was being reviewed back home." "Writers Seen at the Festival Scene", Negro Digest, June 1966, p. 50. As Maya Angelou later commented:
This book was welcomed when it was first published in 1966. Its brave examination of a loving, yet painful, relationship between a Black mother and her son is even more important today. Rosa Guy is a fine writer and she continuously gives us new issues to contemplate. Welcome Bird at My Window. Bird at My Window at Coffee House press.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Guy set out to record the voices of young black Americans in a 1970 documentary work entitled Children of Longing, which contains first-hand accounts of the experiences and aspirations of young people "growing up in a hostile world". "Children of Longing" (review), Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1971. "Rosa Guy" (obituary), The Sunday Times, July 9, 2011. She traveled in the Caribbean, living for a while in Haiti and Trinidad. "Rosa Guy", Encyclopædia Britannica.
Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members and friends who care and love each other, and her trilogy of novels for young people — The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978) — is based on her own personal experiences, as well as those of many young African Americans growing up in New York City with little or no money or support from family. Ruby tells the story of a young girl seeking love and friendship, who finds it in Daphne Duprey, allowing both girls a new insight of relationships and love.
Guy's 1983 novel A Measure of Time, "about a self-made woman's rise amid the Harlem Renaissance", was characterized in Kirkus Reviews as "a restless, gritty, earthy narrative which encompasses flowering and decay--in one woman's life, but also in the brief blooming of the place-and-people that was Harlem's heyday." According to The New York Times, the novel "offers an evocative tour of 20th century black America from the rural south to the streets of New York City. Dorine Davis, the book's protagonist and first person narrator, is a brash and intelligent guide; her observations about people and places are funny, pointed and often moving. ...she and the Harlem settings are vividly described, filled with life and a pleasure to read about."
Published in 1985, Guy's novel My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl has been described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid", "with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." In Guy's story, Desiree is a beautiful peasant who falls in love with a handsome upper-class boy whom she saved in an accident. His family does not approve of Desiree, for she is too black and too poor for their son who will be king. Concepts of sacrifice and pure love reign throughout the novel. It was adapted for the Broadway theatre musical, Once on This Island by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. The show's original production ran for a year, from 1990 to 1991, and in December 2017 it was revived at the Circle in the Square Theater, winning the 2018 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical.
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