African American Literature
Finding a Way Home
Essays by Owen E. Brady, Kelly C. Connelly, Juan F. Elices, Keith Hughes, Derek C. Maus, Jerrilyn McGregory, Laura Quinn, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Daniel Stein, Lisa B. Thompson, Terrence Tucker, and ...
Conversations with Albert Murray
As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Artists as diverse as Walker ...
Blackness and Modernism
During his career as a writer-intellectual, John Edgar Wideman in his personal life has overcome feelings of alienation from the black community and has reoriented himself as a participant in black culture. ...
A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader
Over the course of his brief career, Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) became an important critical voice for African American scholarship as well as a widely read chronicler of the African American gay experience. ...
Conversations with Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur "genius" ...
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaabrings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes ...
Shadowing Ralph Ellison
In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short ...
The Mulatta and the Politics of Race
From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle ...
Black Writers, White Publishers
Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as “a book about Negroes by a Negro,” despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel from ...
Claiming the Heritage
Nearly all black female novelists of twentieth-century America have found the essential substance of their art in one source---the history of black women in America.
With great range and in many voices ...