Don Byas (1913–1972) may be lesser known than the counterparts he played with—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others—but he was an enigma. He never stayed with a band for ...
In this insightful new volume, Jack Chambers explores Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s music thematically, collating motifs, memes, and predilections that caught Ellington's attention and inspired ...
In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience ...
Prophecy reimagines the world. It critiques what is and encourages its audience to imagine what could be. All prophecy, therefore, begins with a person willing to reimagine their own situation. In the ...
Committed to developing frameworks for defining and evaluating Black poetry, literary scholar Stephen E. Henderson (1925–1997) examined the question: What makes a poem Black? In his critical approach, ...
Contributions by Ruth R. Caillouet, Mary C. Carruth, Nancy Dixon, Kathleen Downes, Edward J. Dupuy, Shari Evans, Paul Fess, Carina Evans Hoffpauir, Leslie Petty, Heidi Podlasi-Labrenz, Tierney S. Powell, ...
Booker “Bukka” White (1905–1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in ...
Despite Hollywood’s recent efforts to appeal to more racially diverse audiences, mainstream movies routinely present a limited view of nonwhites generally, and Black women specifically, in stark contrast ...
Between 1937 and 1940 fieldworkers in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project interviewed around 3,500 formerly enslaved people in North America, resulting in roughly 20,000 pages ...
Contributions by Cassandra D. Chaney, Shannon M. Cochran, Samuel P. Fitzpatrick, Judson L. Jeffries, Zada Johnson, Tony Kiene, Aaron J. Kimble, Jerod Lockhart, Molly Reinhoudt, Paul N. Reinsch, Laurel ...