(1976) Rated "as important a photographer as she is a writer", Wilmer is the author of the photograph-led The Face of Black Music (Da Capo Press, 1976), which like Jazz People is considered a canonical and influential text in music criticism. As Serious As Your Life (1977) Wilmer's book As Serious as Your Life, first published in 1977 by Allison and Busby, is now a classic of jazz writing, referencing in its title something said to her by McCoy Tyner: "Music's not a plaything; it's as serious as your life." The first account of the revolutionary "free jazz" and its practitioners, it also documents women's experiences in relation to the "new jazz" in African-American communities, and deviates from the "masculinist rule of exclusion". Presenting sexual politics in the world of jazz, Wilmer unearthed sexual politics in music criticism itself. In her work, she presents a "superb descriptive journey that moves the reader through a number of seemingly incommensurable communities simultaneously.... This is the vision and possibility of community when the struggle toward freedom recognizes the intersections of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality in addition to race and class, as the basis for improvisational practices". As Serious As Your Life was reprinted by Serpent's Tail in March 2018, when Michael J. Agovino wrote in The Village Voice: "During the 1960s and '70s 'counterculture', much of which became a massive cash register, Val Wilmer fixed her strobe lights onto a musical and political landscape that really did in fact run counter to the culture. A shame so few — blacks and whites — were paying attention at the time. But her book, and the work it documented, remains as serious, and necessary, as ever." Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This (1989) Wilmer's autobiography, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World (Women's Press, 1989), details her development as an artist/journalist, and includes her coming out as a lesbian in a largely heterosexist musical milieu. Other documentation and archival projects In addition, Wilmer has consistently over the years written biographical articles on Black British musicians from the 1940s and 1950s and about photography. She was a member of the advisory board for The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2nd edition), edited by Barry Kernfeld, and the author of 63 entries. Wilmer provided the foreword to John Gray's Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990. She