Literature
Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature ...
Conversations with Beth Henley
With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far ...
Memories of Africa
Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States suggests a new lens for viewing African Diaspora studies: the experiences of African memoirists who live in the United States. The book shows how ...
African American Adolescent Female Heroes
In the wake of the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, inequalities and disparities were brought to light across the publishing industry. The need for more diverse, representative young adult ...
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats offers the first complete biography of acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983) intended for adult readers. Drawing extensively from his unpublished ...
The Welcome
Ashton, Mississippi, provides the deceptively sterile, conforming, and blindly respectable background in The Welcome, a novel written by Hubert Creekmore in 1948. After moving to New York following Jim’s ...
Conversations with Terrence McNally
Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself ...
Into the Jungle!
Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific ...
They Also Write for Kids
Outside the world of children’s literature studies, children’s books by authors of well-known texts “for adults” are often forgotten or marginalized. Although many adults today read contemporary ...
At Risk
Jennifer Griffiths's At Risk: Black Youth and the Creative Imperative in the Post–Civil Rights Era focuses on literary representations of adolescent artists as they develop strategies to intervene against ...