Thursday, March 19, 2020

Bad Men & Creativity



A month from now, my book Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers, will be released by the University of Virginia Press. The book, summarized here, focuses on the results of so many different writers being drawn to "bad men" and black boys as artistic muses.

Early on, I began thinking about my subject in the context of creativity research -- a field where researchers think about a wide range of issues concerning idea generation, productivity, approaches to composition, and so forth. Whereas as literary scholars concentrate on artistic works, we don't always cover our subjects in the way that creativity researchers do. Thus, I began combining creativity studies and African American literary studies. 

Taking this approach gave me opportunities to consider works by several different writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Elizabeth Alexander, Paul Beatty, Tyehimba Jess, and Evie Shockley, in new and exciting ways. I was also inspired to think about varied modes of composition -- poems, rap lyrics, comic strips, a novel, news articles, and blog entries.

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You can order Bad Men from the University of Virginia Press. Receive a 30% discount by using the promo code: 10BAD30.

Related:
A notebook on Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Awesome. I so look forward to this book!