Austin, Gayle. “Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 53-62. Focuses on Childress as social critic and transformer of images of black women. Discusses Trouble in Mind and Wine in the Wilderness in the context of Elizabeth Abel’s three stages of feminist criticism.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Black Women Playwrights Exorcizing Myths.” Phylon 48 (Fall, 1997): 229-239. Examines the work of Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange in dispelling stereotypical myths of African American characters, such as the tragic mulatto and the comic Negro, and in presenting new constructions, such as the black militant and the evolving black woman.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Contains summaries and comparisons of the work of Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange.
Childress, Alice. Interview by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. An interesting conversation with Childress.
Dugan, Olga. “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright.” The Journal of Negro History 81 (1996): 123-137. Examines Childress’s essays as a reflection of her theory of a black self-determinist theater, in which individual black playwrights should use Negro culture and history in plays that demonstrate black self-determination. Childress believed such plays should focus on realistic situations and conditions under which African Americans live.
Jennings, LaVinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. A comprehensive, accessible critical introduction to Childress’s life and work. Especially helpful are a succinct chronology of Childress’s life and work and a bibliography divided into primary sources—Childress’s novels, plays, productions in other media, and her articles, essays, and interviews—and secondary sources.
Maguire, Roberta S. “Alice Childress.” In Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Third Series, edited by Christopher Wheatley. Vol. 249 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. A good introduction to Childress. Contains biographical information and an evaluation of her works.