Kathleen Collins

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kathleen Collins (also Katherine; also Kathleen Conwell ; Kathleen Conwell Collins ; Kathleen Collins Prettyman ; born March 18, 1942 in Jersey City ; died September 18, 1988 in Nyack ) was an American writer and film producer.

Life

Kathleen Collins' father worked as a mortician and later as a teacher. He was the first African American MP in New Jersey state . She attended high school and from 1959 Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs , where she received a BA in philosophy and religion in 1963. In 1962 she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and agitated in the state of Georgia for the right to vote for the black population, where she was imprisoned twice.

She worked as a French teacher in Newton , Massachusetts and attended evening classes at Harvard University . In 1965 she received a scholarship for France and studied film history with a focus on the adaptation of novels , a role model for her was the work of Eric Rohmer . In 1966 she received a master's degree from the Sorbonne . During that time she also wrote translations for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma . She then worked for the radio station WNET in New York City .

In 1974 she became a professor at the City College of New York , where she was appointed professor of film history and screenwriting . In 1980 she filmed a short story by Henry Roth . In 1982 she wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay for the film Losing Ground , which she also directed herself. The film is considered to be one of the first to be directed by an African-American . Collins then wrote two more plays and her first novel.

Collins died of breast cancer. She was married twice and had two children. She lived in Piermont , New York .

Collins' work was considered forgotten until the film Losing Ground was shown in a cinema for the first time in 2015 . Collins daughter put together a volume of unpublished short stories from the estate in 2016.

Works (selection)

  • Losing Ground . Movie
  • In the midnight hour . Drama. 1981
  • The Brothers: a Play in three Acts . Drama. 1982
  • Lollie: A Suburban Tale . Novel. 1984
  • Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? . Short stories. Posthumously. Ecco Press, 2016
    • Once only. Stories . Translation Brigitte Jakobeit, Volker Oldenburg. Zurich: Kampa, 2018

literature

  • Chandra Tyler Mountain: Katherine Conwell Collins , in: The Greenwood encyclopedia of multiethnic American literature. 1. A - C . Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2005 ISBN 0-313-33060-3 , pp. 482-484

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan McAloon: Radical resonanance . Book review, in: Financial Times , February 25, 2017, p. 13
  2. ↑ Meike Fessmann : Love instead of politics , review, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 6, 2018, p. 18
personal data
SURNAME Collins, Kathleen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Collins, Katherine Conwell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Jersey City
DATE OF DEATH September 18, 1988
Place of death Nyack