Conversing Almost 30 Years with William J. Harris about Amiri Baraka

Back in 2009, the guys in one of my classes were surprised and fascinated when I told them that I had been having an active conversation about Amiri Baraka with my former professor William J. Harris for ten years. The guys in subsequent years were just as impressed, and in fall 2026, when I let the young men know that Professor Harris and I have been talking about Baraka for 27 years, they'll likely be impressed as well.

Back in 2000, when I read the acknowledgements of Lorenzo Thomas's book Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, he noted that his work had benefited from “a lively conversation with Jerry W. Ward, Jr., that has continued for two decades.” At the time, the idea of a twenty-year conversation with someone about African American literary art and authors seemed almost unthinkable to me. But now, it feels normal.

A couple weeks ago, I was sharing some thoughts about Phillis Wheatley and Amiri Baraka with Professor Harris. I understand why the young men in my classes from the past several years find this decades-long exchanges so striking. My conversations about Baraka with Professor Harris have persisted longer than my current students have been alive.

The guys are also intrigued because they have had little experience with the idea of a Black man having an extended conversation about the arts with a senior Black man who is not a father or uncle. More than a few of them laugh and look skeptical when I tell them that I expect to talk with them for decades about ideas, the arts, and artists like Baraka as well.

For these reasons, they enjoy hearing about my intellectual conversation journey with Professor Harris. We first met in 1999 when I visited Penn State while considering graduate school. We started talking about Baraka then and continued those conversations during my time as a graduate student in his classes. Over time, our discussions expanded to include various other literary artists, the Black Arts Movement, and jazz.

After I earned my PhD and began my professional career as a teacher, we kept touching base and continuing those conversations about Baraka and those other topics. Eventually we added new subjects as well, such as new Black writers who had emerged and the work of visual artists.

Talking with Professor Harris about Baraka for nearly three decades has shown me how intellectual dialogue can stretch across an extended period of time.

Related:

• A Notebook on the Work of Amiri Baraka

• A Notebook on William J. Harris

Writing about Readers and Reading

By Joyce Woodard

I’ve only been working as a contributing writer-researcher for nearly a month, and it has already been extremely beneficial to me.

As a journalism major, it has been so exciting to interview students and write new entries every week. Prior to this opportunity, I was only writing assignments, which is an issue, seeing as though I want to pursue journalism/writing professionally.

Growing as a writer is what I enjoy the most, but speaking to Black women students every week has also been a meaningful highlight of this journey. I've had the chance to speak to so many intelligent and determined Black women, which I have found incredibly inspiring.

My experience so far has been amazing, and I can’t wait to see how much more I will have improved and learned by the end of the semester.

Related:

• Notes on Black Readers & Digital Culture

From Dataset to Interpretation

By Jade Harrison

Identifying patterns requires careful observation, analysis, and the aggregation of large amounts of data, but interpreting what those patterns mean requires textual analysis, contextualizing, and describing the deeper meaning of trends that emerge.

Gabriella Pardlo, a member of our Data Ranger team, imagines the possibilities that open up when we use literary analysis to contextualize numerical trends across 300 short stories, noting that the archive we are creating, “allows people to make widespread connections. They can easily examine the writing techniques Black authors lean on in order to be successful.” 

Rather than analyzing one individual Black writer’s approaches to character representation, dialogue, and settings, combining the data annotations and analyzing them as whole allows us to identify overarching patterns across the stories and make connections between writers from the 1880s to the 2020s. I find that color-coding by annotations for a story before organizing my exploratory findings into an accessible data sheet helps ensure that my critical interpretations of characters, spaces, and spoken exchanges remain grounded in close reading.

When reviewing multiple annotated stories together, I begin to notice patterns in character dialogue, including gendered trends in who speaks and receives the most dialogue and the locations where these exchanges take place. The gendered dynamics of which characters speak and receive the most dialogue in early-20th-century Black women’s fiction, for instance, shifts in the late 20th century with the increased visibility of Black women writers. Pattern recognition is only the first step of literary analysis, because those findings are meaningless without literary analysis and contextualization to understand the diversity of themes, genres, characters, and geographical locations that Black writers create in their literary artistry.

In my work, quantitative patterns reveal how often and in what tones certain types of characters speak and receive dialogue during spoken exchanges, but literary interpretation allows me to contextualize these findings to show how they offer significant insight into how writers depict voice, agency, and emotional interiority in Black fiction.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Genre Sensitivity and Annotation Decisions

By Jade Harrison

Black writers work across a range of fictional genres, and because each genre follows different conventions, annotating Black short fiction requires flexibility when gathering context about characters, settings, and dialogue.

Lyric Hoover, a member of our Data Rangers team, has observed that “Black speculative writers often remain more race-neutral than non-speculative Black writers, mentioning character race only sparingly, if at all,” which points to the wide variances between Black writers and the conventions they use to create fiction. The use of rigid coding categories when annotating Black fiction comes with limits, especially given the wide range of genres that Black writers engage. To address these challenges, we established a structured coding system for annotating by creating resources such as a controlled vocabulary and a data dictionary that offer broad but concise terms and categories capable of capturing the nuances of characters, settings and space, and dialogue across genres while maintaining consistency.

Black speculative fiction writers create otherworldly settings, may introduce characters who are not human, use unknown time periods, or purposely obscure descriptive information such as race, age, and gender, requiring annotators to think even more deeply about what types of spaces are being presented, who qualifies as a character, how to determine historical context, and how to code information when characters’ unique identifiers are obscured. In comparison to realist and historical fiction, Black speculative fiction writers frequently do not use racial identifiers for their characters because they use the genre to bypass the barriers of the “real world,” employing the supernatural, aliens or non-human entities, or advanced technology as ways to critique and examine the social and political struggles that have historically impacted Black people. Although we are working within a structured coding system, we had to ensure that the terms and categories used during annotation remained flexible enough to accommodate any genre of Black fiction in order to avoid flattening or erasing important aspects of the Black experience.

This annotation guidelines for this project provides the structure needed to keep data standardized during collection and categorization, but its flexibility allows annotators to bring imagination, critical thinking, and literary interpretation to their work with Black short stories.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Transforming Literature into Data

By Jade Harrison

When a short story becomes a dataset, the scale of interpretation transforms from individual moments to structural patterns.

As Lyric Hoover, a member of our Data Rangers explained, “When annotating ‘Patient Zero’ by Tananarive Due, I noticed how transforming literature into data allowed me to readily notice patterns in character dialogue, like Due’s tendency in this story to summarize conversations rather than write them out as regular dialogue.” Her reflection mirrors what I observe across the project. Once dialogue is tracked consistently, a writer’s structural tendencies become more visible to the reader.

When dialogue, character presence, and setting are quantified, patterns of emphasis become easier to track. We can see who speaks most often, which spaces recur, and how frequently certain interactions shape the narrative. This broader visibility allows us to interpret narrative structure at scale while remaining attentive to literary nuance.

Working between story and spreadsheet has clarified for me that data modeling and literary analysis function best when they shape one another.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

The Value of Merging Comics Studies and African American Literary Studies

1. Deepening Our Reading of Black Comics
Reading Black Panther through African American literary studies reveals how Ta-Nehisi Coates draws on continuums shaped by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, and others, transforming superhero narrative into Black historical meditation and diasporic world-building.

2. Expanding the African American Literary Archive
Recognizing comics as serious artistic production acknowledges that major Black writers now work in visual narrative forms and positions Coates’s fifty-issue run on Black Panther as a significant contribution worthy of preservation and study.

3. Tracking Attention and Visibility Across Media
Bringing these fields together clarifies how buzz, adaptations, media amplification, and uneven reception shape which Black writers gain prominence and which remain marginalized.

4. Highlighting Collaborative Creative Networks
Merging comics studies with African American literary studies shifts focus from the solitary author to the broader creative ecosystem of writers, artists, editors, and the expansive “Comics Tree” surrounding a major figure like Coates. 

5. Securing Cultural Memory
Integrating Black comics into the institutional frameworks of African American literary study increases the likelihood that works like Coates’s Black Panther endure rather than fading amid the rapid churn of the comics marketplace.

Related: 
• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

5 Reasons to Read a Book on Black Panther

Marvel’s Black Panther comic book isn’t just a character — it’s a cultural battleground. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run, the series becomes a high-profile arena where debates about race, representation struggles, nationhood, and media visibility are staged within the powerful storytelling machinery of mainstream comics.

Here are five reasons to read a book devoted to this moment:

Because Black Panther is bigger than a superhero. It’s a long-running cultural site where ideas about Africa, Black power, and global Black identity get staged, revised, and contested.

Because Coates’s run is a rare crossover moment. A nationally visible Black essayist and novelist entering Marvel created an unusual collision of literary celebrity, comics industry logic, and mass attention.

Because the book explains why “diversity” is never simple. It shows how representation gains can produce new tensions, uneven visibility, and backlash, even when the outcome looks like progress.

Because it reveals how Marvel operates as an attention machine. The study highlights how companies leverage “buzz,” publicity, and cultural capital to shape what gets read, celebrated, and sold.

Because it offers a new way to read comics. By bringing African American literary studies into conversation with comics studies, the book gives readers tools for understanding Black Panther as serious Black artistic production, not just pop culture.

Related: 

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

One Possible Solution for Organizing Short Fiction

By Kenton Rambsy

My approach to annotating over 300 short stories using a shared schema or framework seeks to track several features related to character demographics, character dialogue, and geography-setting references.

These categories are derived from features that literary scholars already analyze yet encoding or organizing them in such a way facilitates our ability to perform computational analysis across several texts. Instead of reading stories in isolation, the framework makes their internal architecture visible and comparable. A professor teaching “The Gilded Six Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, could discover other stories that focus on an extramarital affair, or a person reading “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison can focus on other stories that incorporate flashbacks.

Once these features are marked up consistently, we can compare stories across writers and even historical periods to see where patterns repeat and where they diverge. We can identify stories that rely on concentrated speech between only women characters, stories structured around private spaces like a bedroom inside a family home or stories that focus on characters from a certain region or with specific attributes. Those comparisons provide the basis for grouping texts by craft and creative features rather than by period alone.

Therefore, by creating a scaffolding for short stories, this project attempts to create a more durable way of discussing short stories in the field by building an infrastructure necessary for classification and sustained comparison.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project