Gwendolyn M. Parker is an author and memoirist whose work has chronicled the experience of the black middle class in America. She was born in Durham and lived in the Hay-Ti section of Durham until 1960 when she moved with her family to Mount Vernon, New York. She attended the Kent School, a private boarding school, in Connecticut, through high school and later attended Radcliffe. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1972, Parker studied tax law at New York University, graduating in 1975. She then joined the Wall Street law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft, leaving two years later to become a tax lawyer with American Express. While at American Express she advanced to the position of senior strategic analyst in the Office of Corporate Planning.
Parker left American Express in 1986 to devote herself to writing full-time. Her first novel, These Same Long Bones, was published in 1994. It is set in the segregated Hay-Ti section of Durham, North Carolina in the 1940s. Her memoir Trespassing: My Sojourn in the Halls of Privilege was published in 1997 and chronicles her youth, college years, brief career with a Wall Street law firm, and her tenure with American Express. The book focuses on her struggles to earn a place in a corporate culture dominated by white males and her attempts to understand her position as a successful African American member of the middle class in the United States.
