Although Losing Ground was denied large-scale exhibition, it was among the first films created by a Black woman deliberately designed to tell a story intended for popular consumption, with a feature-length narrative structure.
[1] Collins thus paved the way for Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) to become the first feature-length narrative film created by a Black woman to be placed in commercial distribution.
[2] Born to Loretta (née Pierce) and Frank Conwell and raised in Jersey City,[3] Kathleen, at the age of 15, won first prize at an annual poetry reading contest at Rutgers Newark College of Arts and Sciences for her rendition of Walt Whitman's "A Child Goes Forth" and "I Learned My Lesson Complete".
[4][5] Collins joined the faculty of City College of New York and became a professor of film history and screenwriting,[7] where cinematographer Ronald K Gray encouraged her to go ahead with a screenplay she had adapted from a Henry Roth short story.
Themes frequently explored in her work are issues of marital malaise, male dominance and impotence, freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit, and her protagonists are cited as "typically self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment.
In December 2016, a collection of Collins's short stories was published under HarperCollins' Ecco imprint under the title Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
[18] These acclaimed[19] stories were written in the 1970s and mined some of the same intimate territory of Black women's lives, loves, and losses as Losing Ground.
Prior to its release, it was listed as one of the most anticipated books of the fall of 2016 by the Huffington Post, New York, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, and The Millions.