A book list for collegiate black men

Since 2004, I've taught a course for first-year collegiate black men and various upper-level African American courses that attracted several guys.

Here's a list of twenty-five books that I've covered with collegiate black men over the years.

Autobiographies 
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). By Frederick Douglass. Another classic. 

• Black Boy (1945). By Richard Wright. Stands as a classic alongside Malcolm and Frederick Douglass.

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). By Malcolm X and Alex Haley. This one remains a classic.
• The Beautiful Struggle (2008). By Ta-Nehisi Coates. Moving story of a black boy growing up in Baltimore.

• Decoded (2010). By Jay-Z. A fun, informative read. Contains variety of cool images.
• Between the World and Me (2015). By Ta-Nehisi Coates. Moving letter to son with deep cultural history.

Fiction
• Song of Solomon (1977). By Toni Morrison. A multifaceted, far-reaching novel. One of her best.

• Middle Passage (1990). By Charles Johnson. Captivating narrative about slavery and more.

• The Intuitionist (1999). By Colson Whitehead. A really inventive narrative about race and elevators.
• Seed to Harvest (2007). By Octavia Butler. Expansive narrative about telepaths, slavery, and other issues.

• The Underground Railroad (2016). By Colson Whitehead.  Pathbreaking take on slavery & escape.

Poetry
• Brutal Imagination (2001). By Cornelius Eady. Poems from perspective of alleged bd man.

• Vintage Hughes (2004). By Langston Hughes. Large selection of poems from one of our major figures.
• leadbelly (2005). By Tyehimba Jess. Persona poems focusing on Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. 

• The Big Smoke (2013). By Adrian Matejka. Guys really enjoyed this one on boxing champ, Jack Johnson.

Comics
• A Right to Be Hostile (2003). By Aaron McGruder. Comical story arcs about Huey Freeman and his brother.

• Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther (2015). By Reginald Hudlin. Good narrative about T'Challa and the folks.

• Noble Vol. 1 (2017). By Brandon Thomas. A action-thriller with a lead black hero.

• Black Panther Volume 1 (2017). By Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. Compelling tale, brilliantly drawn.
• Black Panther: Killmonger - By Any Means (2019). By Bryan Hill. A mini-series on the notorious villain. 

• Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1 (2020). By Bryan Hill and others. Good story featuring Black Lightning, others.

Nonfiction 
• Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). By Malcolm Gladwell. A good, intriguing read.
• The New Jim Crow (2010). By Michelle Alexander. A tough, important book on mass incarceration.

• The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). By Isabel Wilkerson. Expansive, interrelated narratives about Great Migration.

• We Were Eight Years in Power (2017). By Ta-Nehisi Coates. Collection of essays by Coates.

Related:

• Reading lists for Black Boys and Collegiate Black Men

Black-white age differences among Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners

I was taking a look at Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners. It turns out that there's a notable age gap between black recipients and everyone else. Since 1980, the average age of the forty-four Pulitzer Prize winners was fifty-eight. (There were two winners in 2008). 

The average age of white poets when they received the prize is 60, and the average age of the seven black recipients is 44. Over the last forty years, W.S. Merwin was the oldest, at 82, when he won the Pulitzer in 2009. Rita Dove was the youngest, at 35, when she won the award in 1980. 

What difference does it make that black poets tend to win at much earlier ages than white poets? Really, there are too few black poets to make an adequate comparison. Still, it's worth considering whether major awards and support in general arrives at different stages in the careers of white and black poets.

Only 6 white poets were under 50 years old when they earned the Pulitzer. By contrast, only one black poet was over the age of 50. 

I wonder if there are structures in place to support larger numbers of young black poets than somewhat older poets. Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, the youngest recipients of Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, at 41 and 40, respectively, in the twenty-first century, began their professional careers as recipients of the Cave Canem Poetry Prizes. Each of the African American winners of the Pulitzer previously participated in Cave Canem.   [Correction: I meant to say, the African American winners in the 21st century. But as noted below in the comments, two folks did not participate before winning the award.]

Related: 

• Tyehimba Jess wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

• Margaret Walker almost won the Pulitzer in 1943

• Does the Pulitzer award for poetry favor "younger" black poets?

Cornelius Eady, Tyehimba Jess, Bad Men, and the Slow Hunch

I discovered Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination (2001) in 2002 or 2003. A few years later, I encountered Tyehimba Jess's leadbelly (2005). I was deeply moved by both books, and though I had not fully and clearly formulated my ideas, I was on the slow, gradual move toward my book, Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers.

In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson discusses this concept "the slow hunch" to highlight how original insights develop over an extend period of time. The genesis of my book on bad men likely had many origins, but I'm certain that coming across Eady's and Jess's works several years ago were foundational for me. Reading and re-reading their books unquestionably sparked and fortified my thinking about the significance of difficult and troubling men for creatvity.

Eady writes about the fictive black man that Susan Smith said kidnapped her children. Jess writes about the legendary, ex-con folk singing musician Huddie Ledbetter, best known as Leadbelly. Eady and Jess take on the personas of their protagonists, giving us inner access to these bad men cultural figures.

Brutal Imagination and leadbelly were always somewhere in my mind nearly anytime over the last decade as I thought of black writers and bad men. Reading those works prepared me to fully engage Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke  (2013) about one of our crucial bad men, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. And more broadly, works by Eady and Jess connected to a large body of compositions featuring the musings of black male protagonists and central figures.   

Related:
• A Notebook on bad men in poetry
• A notebook on Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

1987 as a starting point for Contemporary African American Lit?

I was recently writing about the lack of updates for periodizing contemporary African American literature. I'm still thinking through things, but if I had to designate a key year for new developments in black literary history, I'd say 1987.

That's the year that Toni Morrison's Beloved was published, a book that has become arguably the most critically acclaimed artistic work in American literature. Morrison's novel was nominated for a National Book Award. But in early 1988, a group of forty-eight black writers offered a major public letter of support for Morrison and her work, and in April, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Also in 1987, Rita Dove won the Pulitzer for Poetry for her volume Thomas and Beulah (1986). As many commentators noted, Dove was only the second black winner of the prize after Gwendolyn Brooks's win in 1950. Dove's win inspired several emergent poets, including Natashsa Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and Kevin Young. 

James Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, which marked an end, yes, but also new beginnings. Inspired by the eulogy that Amiri Baraka gave at Badlwin's funeral, poets Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis cofounded the Dark Room Collective.

In 1989, Alexander's poem "The Venus Hottentot" appeared in Callaloo, and in 1990, her volume The Venus Hottentot was published, signaling new developments. Her poem anticipated extended persona projects that would flourish in the twenty-first century. Also in 1990, Charles Johnson won the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Middle Passage. It was the second time a black person had won the award since 1953, when Ralph Ellison was the recipient for Invisible Man.

So these are some crucial moments that lead me to view 1987 or more broadly, the late 1980s and early 1990s as crucial markers for a new literary period in African American literature.

Related:
• When does contemporary African American literature begin?

An Inspiring Book on Mark Twain

I enjoyed reading Susan K. Harris's book Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020). It's a combination of literary criticism, cultural history, travel writing, and memoir. Those combinations, not to mention the good writing, make the book a rewarding read.

From the beginning, Harris's book is really inspiring. She abandons her initial plan to pursue conventional archival work in favor of worldly explorations. "Suddenly library research looked tiresome," she wrote. "I didn't want to spend my three weeks in musty archives. I was in Australia; I wanted to learn about the country, not about a few individuals' conversations with an American visitor a hundred years ago" (2). From there, we're off following Harris as she follows Twain to Australia, India, and South Africa.

Quick background on how I arrived at this book.

Some years back, one of my former professors, William J. Harris, posted photos on Facebook from far-flung places he was traveling to with his wife, Susan. People would ask what he was doing in India and South Africa, and he mentioned that he was tagging along with Susan Harris as she worked on a project on Mark Twain, who had done a world lecture tour in 1895-1896.

I've usually thought of Susan Harris as writing in a much different area of literary study than me, but the photos from around the globe intrigued me. The idea of an American literary scholar tracing someone's steps across multiple countries piqued my curiosity. So in 2019, when I saw announcements that the book would be released in 2020, I put it on my list of books to read.

Harris opens her book in Sydney, Australia. Then, she provides chapters as she moves around India, sometimes with William Harris joining her. After that, she discusses her travels in Tasmania. Later, she ends in South Africa.

Throughout the chapters, she retraces Twain's steps and writing. He traveled down the Ganges river. So does Harris. He visited the Tasmanian Museum. So does she. Twain closely observed animals during his trip. Harris does too. And so forth. She considers the ways that the countries and sites within changed since Twain's time over during the late nineteenth century.

The book motivates me to think about new possibilities for pursuing work in the field of literature. What if literary criticism involves going way out there in the world? What if it means paying closer attention to museums as Harris does in her book? She also confirms the importance of studying following an author over the course of more than three decades.

Harris is a Twain Scholar, and she remains cognizant of the author's shortcomings throughout the book. "Twain believed he wasn't a racist," Harris points out at one moment, "but his public and private writings all demonstrate that he held a set of racial and ethnic preconceptions that color his writings about most of the nonwhite peoples he encountered" (57). Her willingness to engage with the good and bad, the commendable and deplorable, the very difficulty of aspects of Twain's writing and thought processes give the book its complexity.

The endeavor of following Twain also leads Harris to new areas of study. "I not only had to the traveling," she writes, "but also had to learn how to think about animal venues, their histories, ownerships, and missions, and later to teach myselg something about the history of hunting and of conservation theory and to read the literature about animals and the human gaze" (99).For Harris, following is this engaging, intellectual, learning, immersive, and worldly endeavor.

When I say the book is inspiring, I'm noting that it's prompts you to want to go out traveling and observing like she does. She'll encourage you to think about palces as they are now and how they were hundred years ago.

Related:
• Mark Twain and the generative power of difficult men
• Susan Harris's recruitment letter: How I got to Penn State

Susan Harris's recruitment letter: How I got to Penn State

In the fall of 1998, during my senior year at Tougaloo College, I was trying to decide on graduate schools where I might apply. I was an English and history major. One day, while talking through my grad school dilemma, one of my history professors asked if I had ever considered the English program at Pennsylvania State University. I had not.

My professor then showed me a letter that had been sent to an administrator at Tougaloo and then distributed among various professors. The letter was from Susan Harris, director of graduate studies in English, and she was encouraging administrators and professors to make students aware that Penn State was recuriting for its graduate programs.

That letter, which wouldn't have even reached me if that history professor had not mentioned it, was the first time I had thought about attending graduate school in Pennsylavania. I mentioned the letter to another professor, Jerry W. Ward, Jr., and he noted that Bernard W. Bell and William J. Harris were at Penn State. I followed up with Susan Harris, and she arranged for me to visit in early spring.

I made the visit, which went well. At the end of my time at Penn State, Susan Harris asked me if I was going to accept the department's offer. I said, "let me think about it." Shortly after our conversation, I boarded my flight and returned to Tougaloo.

The next morning a little after 7:00 am, the phone rang in my dorm room. I picked it up and said, "hello."
"Hello. This is Susan Harris. Have you thought about it?" she asked.

That's how I ended up at Penn State for graduate school.

Related:
• An Inspiring Book on Mark Twain
• Mark Twain and the generative power of difficult men

Mark Twain and the generative power of difficult men

As I was reading Susan Harris's new book Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020), I couldn't help but think of the research that I done for my own book Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers. Although my book focuses on how black writers are inspired by bad black men figures, I began my work by thinking about the idea of difficult, not just bad, black and white men and how they motivate a range of feedback from audiences and remarkable productions from creators.

[Related: An Inspiring Book on Mark Twain]

As I read Harris's take on Twain, I realized that he was a generative and difficult figure. His difficulty may have faciliated expansive responses. Twain's positive gifts and troubling positions combined to give Harris quite a bit to consider. There are aspects of Twain's work, Harris explains, "that upset and anger me, places where Twain attachs rather than explores the cultures he visits, place where he bares his prejudices in ways that I wish he wouldn't" (14).

Later, she's discussing additional troubling sections of Twain's book Following the Equator. "These chapters," she notes, "offend Hindus and frustrate Twain scholars like me who want to promote Twain's better side." She goes further pointing out that "This is another of the places where my relationship to Twain gets edgy--there are thimes when being a Mark Twain scholar is a lot like having an uncle with a penchant for politically incorrect jokes. You love him but avoid introducing him to your friends because you're afraid he will say something really insulting" (24).

Twain's problems and badness end up, I think, benefitting the overall creativity of Harris's thinking and writing. Her mindfulness that Twain missed things and wrote with a troubling sense of white superiority leads her to look well beyond him and constantly question what he may have overlooked in his travels around the world.

What Harris is exploring with Twain is useful for me, a scholar of African American literature. I sometimes worry that folks in our field downplay difficult or less pleasant sides of our favorite black writers. I understand why: we are sometimes nervous that we could open our subjects to unnecessary criticism in a world where black subjects are already under-valued.

So that all makes sense. Still, reading Harris expressing admiration and frustration with Twain reminded me why dealing with bad or difficult men leads to the production of really creative works. The multiple questions that we raise or the problem finding that we do in relation to cultural figures that have problems lead us in all kinds of  uncahrted territories, which in turns empowers us to produce original works. 

Related:
• Susan Harris's recruitment letter: How I got to Penn State
• An Inspiring Book on Mark Twain

A book list for black boys

A friend of mine asked me for a reading list for a group of black boys. What follows are twenty-five books to get us started.

Autobiographies 
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). By Malcolm X and Alex Haley. This one remains a classic.
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). By Frederick Douglass. Another classic. 
• Between the World and Me (2015). by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Moving letter to son with deep cultural history.
• Decoded (2010). By Jay-Z. A fun, informative read. Contains variety of cool images.
• Black Boy (1945). By Richard Wright. Stands as a classic alongside Malcolm and Frederick Douglass.
• The Beautiful Struggle (2008). By Ta-Nehisi Coates. Moving story of a black boy growing up in Baltimore.

Fiction
• Patternmaster (1976). By Octavia Butler. Powerful, fascinating science fiction narrative.
• The Nickel Boys (2019). By Colson Whitehead. Moving story about black boys held at a troubling reform school.
• The Underground Railroad (2016). By Colson Whitehead.  Pathbreaking take on slavery & escape.
• Things Fall Apart (1958). By Chinua Achebe. Classic novel about life, onset of colonliasm in Nigeria
• Middle Passage (1990). By Charles Johnson. Captivating narrative about slavery and more.

Fiction -- young adult novels
• Miles Morales: Spider-Man (A Marvel YA Novel) (2017). by Jason Reynolds.
• When I Was the Greatest (2014). By Jason Reynolds.

Poetry
• Vintage Hughes (2004). By Langston Hughes. Large selection of poems from one of our major figures.
• The Big Smoke (2013). By Adrian Matejka. Narrative in poems about heavyweight boxing champ, Jack Johnson.
• Long Way Down (2017). By Jason Reynolds. Young adult novel told in poems about gun violence.

Comics
• Black Panther Volume 1 (2017). By Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. Compelling tale, brilliantly drawn.
• Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1 (2020). By Bryan Hill and others. Good story featuring Black Lightning, others.
• Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther (2015). By Reginald Hudlin. Good narrative about T'Challa and the folks.
• A Right to Be Hostile (2003). By Aaron McGruder. Comical story arcs about Huey Freeman and his brother.
• Farmhand Vol 1 (2019). By Rob Guillory. Funny and bizarre narrative, written & drawn by Guillory
• Quincredible Vol. 1: Quest to Be the Best! (2019). By Rodney Barnes and others. Exciting black teenage hero.

Nonfiction 
• Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). By Malcolm Gladwell. A good, intriguing read.
• The New Jim Crow (2010). By Michelle Alexander. A tough, important book on mass incarceration.
• The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). By Isabel Wilkerson. Expansive, interrelated narratives about Great Migration.

Related:

• A book list for collegiate black men

Risky Natures, Collegiate Black Men, and Skateboards

"The adventurer's racial and gender identity play key roles in how individuals map and navigate this risky terrain." --Kristin Jackbonson

When I began reading Kristin Jacobson's book The American Adrenaline Narrative, I knew I was going to be especially interested in her chapter "Risky Natures." It's because the subject of risk or danger comes up in a class that I teach every fall comprised of first-year collegiate black men. At least one or two of the guys ride skateboards or long boards, and I have to warn them about the risk of this notorious hill on our campus.

Now, Jacobson doesn't have extreme sports in mind when she's writing about adrenaline narratives. She's focusing on rafting, deep-sea diving, polar explorations, mountaineering, hiking, etc., which often takes place in wilderness areas. Still, there are some correlations with her explorations and what the guys I work with encounter.

The majority of my black students are from Chicago and then some from St. Louis. For them, a campus like Edwardsville is something of a wilderness. They are initially unsettled by how sparse it is in comparison to their home cities. The guys mention feeling perfectly safe to wander around late at night on campus in ways that would be unthinkable and silly to do in their hometowns.

I make it a point to let the guys know how much gender privilege they have when they mention their fearlessness moving around campus late into the night. "Why do you think women feel less free and comfortable than you do to move around campus at night," I ask. This question and recognition of differences give them pause.

Jacobson mentions "gendered risk regimes" in her book. She discusses the issues that women adventurers contend with as they navigate wilderness areas alone and with men. Still, she offers ample evidence that many women take on the risks. "Despite the dangers and their fears," writes Jacobson, "these women risk physical and emotional hard because the benefits for solo self-discovery outweigh the potential dangers and discomforts" (191).

When does contemporary African American literature begin?

I've been thinking about when contemporary African American literature begins for quite some time now. As a graduate student in the early 2000s, I was examining literature anthologies, and I was curious about the challenges faced by anthologies during the 1970s when pinpointing contemporary authors and works.

I was also thinking about surveys of African American literature as I prepared to begin and then began my career as a professor. I was teaching survey courses, and I wondered how we might label the current era. There were names for previous moments like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But what were labels for moments after that?

The first edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996) close with a section entitled "Literature Since 1970," and the second edition of the Norton, published in 2003, revised the closing section as "Literature Since 1975." The 2014 edition is now entitled "The Contemporary Period."

The suggestion is still that the contemporary moment begins in the 1970s. I don't fully buy that. While I do think that there was a shift during the mid to late 1970s with the decline of the Black Arts Movement, I don't think it has been continuous from that time until to now. That is, I don't view 1976 - 2020 as a single historical era in African American literature.

I think that major events in the field have occurred that make the 1970s and 1980s distinct from the 1990s and twenty-first century. But how do we periodize or mark the beginning and close dates of these moments? It's worth giving the subject some thought.

Discovering Jericho Brown in 2008 (and then reading more)

At some point in 2008, I received an email from my friend, the scholar Kalenda Eaton. She was informing a group of us that one of her former undergraduate classmates was releasing a volume of poetry, and she encouraged us to pick up a copy.

His name is Jericho Brown, she said, and his volume of poetry is entitled Please.

I was immediately interested for a couple of reasons. For one, I was committed to charting developments with contemporary black poetry. And second, I was aware that among the many volumes that people informed me about, only a few were by authors who attended HBCUs. 

After reading Brown's poems in Please and in other venues, I felt like I had known him forever. We were both southern, attended black colleges, and several of his poems revealed that we had witnessed and retained some of the same things from black culture.

I finally met him in person in 2012. My friend Treasure Redmond invited me to a gathering of poets at her place, and there was Jericho. He had one of those wonderful, big southern laughs that fills a room. At one point, folks at the gathering read their poems.

Here's the thing: I don't remember what writing Jericho shared, but I do remember how vocally supportive he was of everyone else who read. He gave the loudest shouts of affirmation after every reader. I'm not sure if I had ever seen the most widely known poet in a room be the most vocal supporter of everyone else.   

Back in 2008, I took note to follow Brown's subsequent works. Two years after meeting him in at Treasure's gathering, I got my hands on his second volume The New Testament (2014). The second book further confirmed our overlapping cultural links. But he was doing more than that. I noticed an even more experienced poet, playing with forms and ideas.

A poetic trilogy: Brown's The New Testament, Laurentiis's Boy with Thorn, Williams's Their in the Interior 

Too, The New Testament was my gateway to some other poets, including Rickey Laurentiis's Boy with Thorn (2015) and Phillip B. Williams's Thief in the Interior (2016).

In 2019, the folks at Copper Canyon Press sent me an advance copy of Brown's The Tradition. I really enjoyed reading and blogging about this, his third volume. He was building on his previous work, and clearly moving in new directions, developing a new form, and highlighting the vulnerability of black bodies.

In early 2020, Cynthia Spence from Spelman College and director of the UNCF/Mellon programs gave a presentation on our campus. At one point, she was mentioning various former Mellon Fellows. She asked the audience, "do you know of the poet Jericho Brown? If not, you will. He's doing really wonderful things." In retrospect, it's like she was predicting his Pulitzer Prize win.

Related:
• A Notebook on Jericho Brown

The changing same of the Pulitzer Prizes

By Laura Vrana

As noted on this blog earlier this week, Colson Whitehead just made history by becoming only the fourth novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize twice (alongside Booth Tarkington [1919 & 1922], William Faulkner [1955 & 1963], and John Updike [1982 & 1991]). History may rarely repeat itself, but larger trends surrounding awards like the Pulitzers do. This post offers preliminary musings about the relationship between “repeat” Pulitzers and racial dynamics.

First, some general points about the Pulitzers and Whitehead: Both of Whitehead’s honored texts—The Underground Railroad (published 2016, awarded 2017) and The Nickle Boys (published 2019, awarded 2020)—merit the distinction in this and many critics’ mind, subjective as awards criteria are. (The fact that Tarkington’s name today is likely to yield quizzical stares even among critics of American literature indicates this arbitrariness. Too, William Gass in 1985 railed against the Pulitzers in fiction for “tak[ing] dead aim at mediocrity,” representing well frequent public dissatisfaction with the prize’s choices.)

Nevertheless, Whitehead’s repeat awarding merits mulling, given the tangible outcomes such awards produce. Particularly in recent decades, these prizes yield notable increases in sales and enormous increases in the author’s visibility, enabling massive career gains with material consequences for future publishing, speaking fees and bookings, and the like.

Now to turn to how these points relate to race: Those effects attain for authors of all types. But their impact can be especially pronounced for writers of color, who are still less likely to acquire significant white readership without the cultural currency bestowed by such awards. As such, black authors’ receipt of such awards is certainly to be celebrated—hence the vast celebrations of Whitehead’s accomplishment on display this week on social media.

Whitehead is far from the first author to become a Pulitzer repeat awardee. In addition to the above-noted three fellow multiple recipients in fiction, 41 other authors in the prizes’ 104-year history have won two, three, or even four times. Any guesses about how many of those have been non-white authors? That’s right: in the seven “Letters, Drama & Music categories,”¹ Whitehead joins only two other writers of color² to have become repeat Pulitzer winners, alongside August Wilson (1987 & 1990) and Lynn Nottage (2009 & 2017).³

One is that the composition of the adjudicating committee⁴ impacts the likelihood of different types of authors (and different aesthetic styles of texts—a whole different beast of a topic) winning, with more judges of color tending to nominate and select more recipients of color. The other is that the criteria for selection and deliberation process are private, shielded from public scrutiny and likely quite subjective. Both factors impact all literary awards. And both can, depressingly, be invoked in implicitly racist claims that political correctness or the “culture wars” produce the general trend—however slow—toward the Pulitzer honoring more writers of color. (Numerically, its progress on that front has been slower than some other major awards like the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.)

However, some might be postulating that Whitehead as a repeat awardee did not “need” the increase in visibility to the same degree that other authors might. This feeling can yield complaints about any repeat recipients. I wonder (though have not had time to grapple with this more than merely anecdotally, via social media observations) whether such complaints about Whitehead might take on a distinct flavor of racism. It will be fascinating to see if any more thorough think-pieces about Whitehead will appear in the times ahead that attempt to mask that racism behind the supposedly “rigorous” critical language used in the academic culture wars.

Notes
1. The seven categories classified thus by the Pulitzer are: Fiction (called “Novel” 1917-1947), Drama, History, Biography, Poetry, General Nonfiction, and Music.
2. Also worth noting is the marked, equally unsurprising, gender disparity among this number, which includes just three women: Nottage, Margaret Leech (History), and Margaret W. Tuchman (Nonfiction).
3. In most categories (especially poetry), the tendency toward repeat awarding has decreased over time compared to the prizes’ earlier decades. So it is interesting that Drama seems to constitute an exception.
4. Gass’s 1985 diatribe also exhibits a sticky stance on the jurists: “Not only will they be partisans of their own tastes—that’s natural—each will be implicitly asked to represent their region, race or sex, because one will have to be a woman, another will have to be a black . . .”

Twenty years of studying works by Colson Whitehead

You want to talk about an extraordinary literary career? Well, look no further than Colson Whitehead. Earlier this week, his book The Nickel Boys was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It was his second Pulitzer.

He earned one with his previous book The Underground Railroad. Listen: that novel also earned a National Book Award for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature.

And hey, I didn't need Whitehead to win those awards for me to be into his works. He won me over with his debut novel, The Intuitionist (1999), which I first read in paperback in 2000. I read that book and felt like I was witnessing something really special. I was captivated by this story about elevator inspectors and curious about the kind of mind that would come up with something like that.

These two books were my entry into Whitehead's works. 

Hold up: I want to interject for a quick moment to say that I sometimes think about book history, which is a field that considers the processes of publication, beyond simply the content of works. That means considering social, cultural, and economic factors associated with book production. It means taking account of issues like marketing, reception, and paratexts. The narratives that Whitehead composed matter to me, and so does the circulation and responses to his works in the world.

Before, during, and after reading The Intuitionist, I flipped to the back cover and re-read the blurb by Walter Mosley: "This extraordinary novel is the first voice in a powerful chorus to come." Sometimes you don't put much stock into book blurbs. But I wondered if Whitehead's debut signaled what might come next for him and others.

I read The Intuitionist one year, and then in the next, he released his second novel John Henry Days (2001). The abundance humor in that second novel prompted me to his first book, as I figured I missed some of the jokes he was telling. In the lead up to the publication of Whitehead's second novel, I checked out a few reviews of the book.

Somewhere around 2006, I started actively reading and building an extensive bibliography of reviews of Whitehead's books. A few years later, when I started blogging, my work tracking reviews on Whitehead had prepared me to produce coverage of books, authors, and special topics, where I recent articles.     

I noticed early on that there were recurring appraisals of vibrant creativity. In fact, I'm certain that part of my own interest in writing about creativity for my own book was linked to becoming increasingly curious about the subject while reading Whitehead and coverage of his books.

Whitehead published nine books between 1999 - 2019. The timing and publishing schedule with his publisher is such that he releases a book in hardcover one year, the next year the paperback for that work is released, and then a year or so later, Whitehead releases a new book. He's been prolific and consistent.

The relationship between Whitehead and Doubleday has been one of the most important author-publisher partnerships in twenty-first century African American book history. "I’ve been saying for twenty years Colson’s a genius," said editor of Doubleday Bill Thomas. "And he keeps proving me right. All of us at Doubleday are so proud to publish this great American novelist." The publisher has been really supportive of Whitehead's work, making sure to actively publicize his books and seek to get the book into the right hands.

Speaking of which, the publisher manage to get an advance copy of The Underground Railroad to Oprah Winfrey, and she chose the novel for her book club. That undoubtedly ensured that the book would have a large readership. Doubleday originally planned to print 75,000 copies of the book, but when Winfrey became involved, they chose to printed 200,000. The Underground Railroad has now sold over 1 million copies.

The New York Times published a special print-only excerpt from The Underground Railroad.

The partnership with Whitehead and his long-time agent Nicole Aragi is also important. In interviews, Whitehead sometimes tells the funny story that his first manuscript was so bad that his first agent dropped him. The unspoken story, though, is that his subsequent work was so good that he and Aragi have stuck together for around two decades now.

Whitehead's first seven books were filled with humor. So I viewed The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys as a notable shift in his tone and approach. The books are serious and in some instances dreadful.

The Pulitzer Prize committee referred to The Nickel Boys as "a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption." This praise contributes to and validates an extensive body of positive commentary about Whitehead's latest novel.

I'm looking forward to re-reading The Nickel Boys sometime soon, and then in a year or so, I suspect, he'll release his next book.

Related:
• A notebook on Colson Whitehead

Jericho Brown wins Pulitzer

Yesterday, Jericho Brown was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his volume The Tradition. What an accomplishment. He's been doing the work for many years now, so to receive an honor like this is really special.

His book The Tradition contains really powerful personal explorations, and the book also includes this form he created known as the duplex.

The Pulitzer committee wrote the following about The Tradition: "A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence."

It's a strong, creative book. And now, it's received this high recognition.

Related:
• A Notebook on Jericho Brown

More on James Smethurst's Amiri Baraka book

I finished James Smethurst's book Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity a few days ago. Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed it. At this point, whenever you read works by Smethurst, you know you're going to get a thorough treatment on the subject he's covering.

[Related: James Smethurst releases book on Amiri Baraka]

I was continually surprised here, because I falsely assumed I knew more about this major author. Smethurst was showing me that I still have much to learn about Baraka. I knew, for instance, that Baraka had written some liner notes, but Smethurst made me aware of how many: more than twenty sets for albums between 1959 and 1986. He also traced out more of the history.

In the past, I only gave passing attention to disagreements between Baraka and Ellison over Baraka's Blues People. Here though, Smethurst gave Baraka's book, Ellison's negative review, and the aftermath a much larger treatment.

He also does important work tracing Baraka's sound or performance style in the presentation of poems over the course of his career. This topic is something that has captured my attention for many years now, trying to think about how Baraka's poetry readings evolved.

Smethurst takes on the role of critical cultural witness, as he opens and closes the book mentioning observations from the large, diverse groups of people who attended Baraka's wake and funeral. "It struck me then, and now," wrote Smethurst, "that there had probably never been a wake and funeral for a poet in the United States like those for Baraka" (5). He returns to the funeral scene in the conclusion noting that one could see the different strands and moments of Baraka's life in attendance: "family, Muslims, Baptists, poets, actors, directors, playwrights, academics, community activists, dancers, politicals, of course, the musicians, and thousands of the people of Newark and its surrounding cities and towns" (197).

I liked this idea of taking a public moment as this jumping off point for a study.

Beyond pushing me to think more about Baraka, the powerful lesson in Smethurst's book concerns getting me to think about approaches to producing a solid single-author study.

Related:
• A notebook on the work of James Smethurst

Blogging about poetry in April 2020

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• April 26: An enriching Amiri Baraka creative critical domain
• April 14: A post from William J. Harris on birds sparked Amiri Baraka project
• April 13: A Notebook on the Wonderful Wordless Phrasings of Amiri Baraka
• April 1: Blogging about poetry in March 2020