Although she lived and worked outside of New York City, her early fiction is sometimes considered as part of the broader Harlem Renaissance literary movement.
[3] Four short stories by Gertrude Schalk appeared in the Saturday Evening Quill, a publication the Saturday Evening Quill Club, a black literary organization cofounded in Boston by Eugene Gordon, of which Schalk was an original member.
[9] In 1961, Schalk became one of the first black members (along with Hazel Garland) of the Women's Press Club of Pittsburgh.
[11][12] Gertrude Schalk married John Wesley Johnson III, a journalist from Ohio, in 1946,[13] and was widowed when he died in 1969.
While living in Pittsburgh, she founded that city's chapter of Jack and Jill of America.