Carlene Hatcher Polite (August 28, 1932 – December 7, 2009) was an American writer.

Early life

Carlene Hatcher trained at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance

Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance

Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance is located in New York City and is the headquarter to the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and the Martha Graham Dance Company, which is the oldest continually performing dance company in the world....

 and then danced professionally from 1955 to 1963 in New York and Detroit. She also worked for civil rights

Civil rights

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...

 organizations, including the Detroit Council for Human Rights and the NAACP.

Writer

In 1964 Polite moved to Paris where her first book The Flagellants was published in French in 1966, and was subsequently published in English in 1967. The book received critical acclaim, with Mel Watkins

Mel Watkins (author)

Mel Watkins is an American critic and author. A former staff member at The New York Times, he has written extensively about comedy and African American literature and has often appeared as a commentator in television documentaries about entertainment history and performers such as Chris Rock and...

 in The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...

stating it was “a complex, scathing and often brilliant depiction of the disintegration of a black couple’s relationship,” and that it “was among the first fictional works by a black woman to focus directly on the theme of the sometimes bitter antagonism between black men and women.”

Polite published her second book Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play, about the investigation into the death of a black nightclub dancer in Paris, in 1975.

Later years

Polite joined the University at Buffalo in 1971, where she taught creative writing, African American history and literature until her retirement in 2000. She had tenure bestowed upon her and served on several notable committees, as well as Chaired the American Studies Department for a short while. She was famous at the University for her amiable teaching style, unique and stylish garments that she wore everyday as well as her near encyclopedic knowledge of a wide breadth of subjects including: race, gender, history, sexuality, spirituality, religion, quantum mechanics, sports and theater. Her classroom assignments often centered around books such as The African Origin of Civilization by Cheikh Diop, Stolen Legacy by James and countless others. Her writing assignments included four standard papers,, 1 page each that served as mid-term and final papers---centering around being in love, falling out of love and having a student write about being the opposite gender. In her tenure at the University she only had two Teacher's Assistants (John Ransom and Brian Kyle Doyle (née Kyle Phoenix) feeling that their personal abilities and writing interest as well as knowledge were sufficient to serve her classrooms needs. Ms. Polite decided that she had completed all that she had to say in fiction and purposefully did not publish anything else though she continued to write fiction and non-fiction and was an avid fan of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's work.

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