Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, was published in 1982 and won the 1983 National Book Award in the category First Novel.[5] It was adapted as a 1989 television miniseries of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.
Naylor's work is featured in such anthologies as Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (ed. Terry McMillan, 1990), Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (ed. Clarence Major, 1992) and Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992).
During her career as a professor, Naylor taught writing and literature at several universities, including George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, University of Kent, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University.[6]
In 1989 Naylor was the Zale Writer-In-Residence at Newcomb College of Tulane University.[7] There she performed a reading of her works as well as being publicly interviewed by Filipe Smith of the Tulane English Department.[8]
Her last novel, 1996, was published by Third World Press in 2005. In the fictionalized memoir, she wrote about being surveilled and harassed by the NSA. "But they now have technology that is able to decode the brain patterns, and to detect what people are actually thinking," she said in an interview with NPR about her novel. "And they have another technology called microwave hearing, where they can actually input words into your head, bypassing your ears."[9][10]
In 2009, Naylor donated her archives to Sacred Heart University. The collection is currently on loan at Lehigh University for digitization.[11]
Naylor died of a heart attack on September 28, 2016, while visiting St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. She was 66.[12][13]
In 2019, Sapphira Wade, an unfinished manuscript from Naylor's archive, was published online and in African American Review.[14]
