“I’m ready for my high-heeled red sneakers,” Shay Youngblood said to the love squad holding her as she approached her transition from this plane. Shay, pictured above at right—I'm to the left—in a photo taken in Providence in the 1990s, died from ovarian cancer on June 11, 2024, at age 64. Instead of a funeral, she called for a party, a giant party. So as Koko Taylor, one of Shay’s favorites, used to sing, we “pitched a wang dang doodle all night long.” Dozens of folks paraded into the downtown Atlanta venue on a lush August night, filling the air with laughter, extending widespread hands, plunging into reunion. This spirit of reunion encompassed several people who’d never officially “met” in real life, yet who knew each other through Shay’s careful tending and sharing of our stories.
Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1959, Sharon Ellen Youngblood inherited her mother’s beauty and free spirit. Her mother died when she was a toddler. Shay was raised by her grandmother and a wide circle of other hard-working Black Southern women throughout the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. In the company of this congregation of elders, Shay abided with their stories, memorizing their gestures and cadences. She learned storytelling could unearth difficult truths, exorcize suffocating emotions, or bring the reins of the storyteller’s agency back into their own hands. Stories well spun could also conjure love. Throughout her life she was a story collector, and she could coax an epic tale from someone she’d only just met. People would tell it true, for they knew she would hold their story with care.
Shay leaves a lush archive of award-winning artistic work. Short stories (The Big Mama Stories); plays (Shakin’ The Mess Outta Misery; Talking Bones; Square Blues, among others); novels (Soul Kiss; Black Girl in Paris; Winter Prophet); performance works (Add Architecture/Stir Memory); children’s books (Mama’s Home; A Family Prayer); these alongside paintings and other visual works; and numerous bespoke artist books. At the time of her passing, she was simmering several projects. Shay wrote until she could no longer. Even then, she whispered fragments of poetry, her eyes aflame with all that she was seeing.
Future readers, performers, fellow artists, and soul sojourners will be guided by her archive to adventure—within and without—much as Shay, herself, was drawn, guided, and emboldened by the artists and thinkers who shaped her, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Pat Parker, Ntozake Shange, and Audre Lorde. “Even if you’d just met Shay, you felt as though you always had known her”—variations of this statement were said again and again in the halls and rooms of the homegoing celebration, because it was true. I met Shay in August of 1991, on my very first day at Brown. She was beginning her MFA in playwriting with the legendary Paula Vogel, and I, graduate work in theater. Ours was a soulmates-at-first-sight meeting—we knew instantaneously it was a forever friendship. Shay taught me we should always stay open to meeting new people who might bloom us like the sun blooms flowers.
Shay loved libraries—just today, two of her Atlanta soulmate friends, Diana and Marianna, messaged me. They sent a photo of a colorful mural featuring Shay in her old Columbus library, writing, a yellow flower tucked behind her left ear. Shay was as skilled a reader as she was a writer, especially when it came to reading people. She read with her full attention. In my mind’s eye I see Shay reading, sunlight bouncing off the riot of colors in her space, her countless brightly spined books, the air humming with invitation to dream, to contemplate, and catch up to yourself in time. Then something she read would evoke a fresh wonder, some revelation deep within, and she’d smile. It is among my greatest blessings to have seen Shay Youngblood’s smile break on her face so many times. At her homegoing, there were smiles in all directions—a kaleidoscope of crescent moons. I took in the wonder of Shay’s living constellation of connection: the doctor who’d given Shay her Peace Corps medical exam then became friend and confidant for life… Shay’s cousins, two elegant sisters, resplendent in shades of yellow and gold… a bevy of friends from all her foundational sojourns in Europe and across the U.S…. and the circle of beloveds who tended her last breaths, who stood exhausted yet exalted, swaying and surveying the other celebrants. Images from Shay’s life flashed across a huge screen as a wide range of speakers from Shay’s life gave impassioned testimony–including Linda Bryant, founder of Charis Books (where Shay gave her very first readings), and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the visionary writer who as a teenager was part of a young Women Writers Group that Shay facilitated at Charis. Filmmaker Natalie Baszile shared footage from the film she is adapting of Shay’s Black Girl in Paris. Folks enjoyed plates full of collard greens, jambalaya, fried chicken, potato salad, and cornbread. Together we became a garden of night-blooming flowers, dancing into the night to the playlist Shay had curated for the occasion. Meanwhile, on Zoom, another of Shay’s friends hosted a gathering for those who could not travel. Shay’s wide, intentional embrace and lifelong determination to bind the pages of her story together gathered us. Her homegoing was a homecoming. Shay showed me the heart has no maximum capacity, and that life lived bravely will open you to that vast truth. So, open to a new page. If it’s full, read deeply. If it’s blank, start dreaming. There’s light, yet.
