Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National ...

Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. "Writing for me is a way of opening up," he states in one of the interviews in this collection, "a way of ...

The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles—New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed ...

Postcolonial discourses on African Diaspora history and relations have traditionally focused intensely on highlighting the common experiences and links between black Africans and African Americans. This ...

Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors ...

Winner 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Choice

Winner 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize

Honorable Mention 2010 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award, Western Literature Association ...

In the past, scholars have looked at narratives of the African diaspora only to discover how these memoirs, poems, and fictions related to the West. The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in ...

The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. Through the minimal form of haiku, Wright (1908–1960) found his poetic connection ...

The interviews in this collection cover Walter Mosley's career and reveal an overarching theme: a belief in the transformative power of reading and writing. Since the 1990 publication of his first novel, ...