William J. Harris, the poet as sketch artist

Here's a whiteboard animation on William J. Harris -- poet and sketch artist.

More here: William J. Harris's Notebook sketches

Related:

• William J. Harris and Poetry magazine

William J. Harris and Poetry magazine

Ok, here we go. I'm excited that Poetry magazine gave me the opportunity to curate the folio, “I Hope You Like Being Here with Me: The Work of William J. Harris” for the February 2023 issue. 

To celebrate the occasion, I've produced a few complementary materials related to Harris's work. 

• William J. Harris, the poet as sketch artist

• William J. Harris's Notebook sketches 

• "The Beauty of Bareness" by William J. Harris (whiteboard animation) 

• From Fenton Johnson to William J. Harris: 100 Black Poets in Poetry

Related: 

• A Notebook on William J. Harris

William J. Harris's Notebook sketches

At some point early in the editing process for the folio "I Hope You Like Being Here with Me: The Work of William J. Harris," editors at Poetry asked me if Professor Harris had any materials from notebooks or journals that he might include. I decided to ask. 

Listen, I wasn't fully prepared for the wonderful response. 

It turns out that for years, Professor Harris has been keeping journals, where he produces little drawings and sketches. Often, he draws what interests him at the many museums he visits in New York City. So when I asked him if he had any materials that I might show, he responded with a few snapshots from his journals. 

It's amazing that I've communicated with Professor Harris now for over 20 years and never thought to ask enough questions about his process. I had no idea about those notebooks, those artistic treasures of his. 

I'm glad I know now, and I'm pleased Poetry readers will get a glimpse at his process as well. 

Related:

• William J. Harris and Poetry magazine 

"The Beauty of Bareness" by William J. Harris

 

Here's William J. Harris reading his poem "The Beauty of Bareness." The poem is from a reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, November 5, 2015. The full reading is available on PennSound.

Working with designers, I produced this video, part of a series, to complement the folio on Harris's work appearing in the February 2023 issue of Poetry magazine.

Related:

• William J. Harris and Poetry magazine 

The Most African American literature courses in the Country

Our newest episode of Remarkable Receptions focuses on the large number of African American literature courses that we offer at SIUE. 

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

• The Black Literature Network

August Wilson

Our newest episode of Remarkable Receptions focuses on August Wilson and adaptations of his works into film. The episode was written by Nicole Dixon. 

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

• The Black Literature Network

Single-author Books on Black Poetry

Here's a non-exhaustive, checklist of single-author books focusing on Black poetry and poets. 

1976: Drumnvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History by Eugene B. Redmond

1985: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic by William J. Harris

1986: The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad

1988: The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad

1988: Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic by Houston A. Baker, Jr.

1997: Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

1999: A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics by Komozi Woodard
1999: Dudley Randall, Broadside Press and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 Julius E. Thompson
1999: Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture by Patricia Fahamisha Brown

2000: Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry by Lorenzo Thomas

2000: Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism by Kimberly W. Benston

2004: Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture by Tony Bolden
2004: Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press by Melba Joyce Boyd
2004: "After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement by Cheryl Clarke
2004: Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

2004: Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton by Hilary Holladay

The Multi-Threaded Literary Briefs

The Multi-threaded Literary Briefs includes interrelated commentary about African American fiction, highlighting a network of linked novels, novelists, literary histories, and various concepts.  The entries focus on: 

Biographical sketches 

Book History 

Key scenes 

Keywords 

Literary Data Work 

Novel adaptations 

Style & structure 

Lists 

Reading and Teaching fiction

Related:

• Entries for Multi-threaded Literary Briefs

• The Black Literature Network

John Keene as Jazz Poet

I was reading John Keene's award-winning Punks: New & Selected Poems (2021), published by The Song Cave, and started thinking of him as a jazz poet -- a description we hear less of these days in poetry but seems fitting in some cases.  

I should say off the top though that jazz poet would be just one descriptor for Keene. His writing in Punks fits into multiple categories--stylistically and thematically. "In assembling the book," Keene told Zachary Issenberg in an interview, "I went back to an older way of looking at poetry collections, which is just to bring things together."

Some years back, I stumbled across Keene's poem, "Apostate" about Miles Davis. I tucked it away, because at the time I was more interested in thinking through Keene's short story collection, Counternarratives.

I was pleased to return to Keene's "Apostate," along with other poems that attended to the music in his collection Punks. Thinking about Keene, in part, as a jazz poet gives me one way of thinking about his wide range of coverage -- the twists and turns, the leaps, experimentation, collaging/sampling, and so forth. Of course, we could also use mixtape artist as another term. But the designation jazz poet works in this case as a way of situating Keene within the history of black poetry. 

From 1965 (the year Keene was born) up through the mid to late 1970s, poetry was experiencing what we might call a heyday of jazz poetry. Folks usually and understandably focus on the militancy of Black Arts poetry, but during that period there were an outpouring of poems celebrating jazz artists, most notably John Coltrane. 

It was only later that people began to really speak of those poems as "jazz poetry" in part because of works like Sascha Feinstein's Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (1993) and the collections 

The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and The Second Set, Vol. 2: The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1996), both co-edited by Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Amiri Baraka persisted in producing jazz poems throughout his life well beyond the 1970s. And so did several others such as Michael S. Harper, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, A. B. Spellman, Larry Neal, and others.  

In recent decades, we've had several poets who might classify as jazz poets. In 2006, Kevin Young edited the anthology Jazz Poems, which includes works by various poets. Still, you didn't hear the term so much in the scholarly discourse. (To be fair, there's relatively little scholarship on contemporary black poetry in general, so there are perhaps many topics we don't hear much about. But I digress). 

All of this gets me back to "Apostate."

It's important, I think, that Keene, who was born and raised in St. Louis, is writing about Miles Davis, who was born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Illinois. That is, Keene is a jazz poet, but for us living in St. Louis, he's a poet from the Metro East writing about a jazz musician from the region. 

Here's a note on "Apostate" that Keene includes in Punks:

On returning to East St. Louis to battle his addiction crisis, Miles Davis's father supposedly stated, 'Don't fail'; once, when a reporter asked Miles Davis how he wanted to be remembered, he reportedly replied, without looking up, 'Sound.'"

Keene is referring to 1953, when Davis returned home to fight his drug addiction while staying in a guest room at his father's place. Thinking about that moment in Davis's life and the poem caught my attention because I'm currently reading Aidan Levy's Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (2022), and he offers in-depth treatment concerning the rise of heroin addiction among several musicians. Reading Levy and Keene has me thinking of them as both jazz historians of sorts. 

Alright, but then Keene is time-traveling too. He's in 1953, and he's jumping ahead, referencing moments in Davis's life that occur later. He writes of Davis "driving that sweet group with Herbie [Hancock] and Wayne [Shorter] in the early 1960s." 

There are three intervals in the poem where Keene moves through Davis's history and thoughts and then mentions death. First, a section closes with, "Death, keep on stepping." Then, "Death, not yet."

And finally, "Death, get ready."

The poem is written in the second person with "you," being Davis. So this is a jazz poem about Davis, but it's also a letter or a correspondence from Keene (or the unnamed poet? Someone else?) to Davis that we're overhearing. To speak this correspondence, to write this letter and poem, Keene has to know Davis's story.      

Alternately, we could think of "Apostate" as a persona poem. From that vantage point, the "you" might be Davis talking, thinking to himself.   

We can identify a lot of jazz poems. It's something else, though, to witness the works of poets who've immersed themselves in the history, music, and life story of a musician like we're seeing with Keene in this Davis poem.

Oh, and let's say something about that title, "Apostate." The term usually refers to someone who's rejected religion, and Keene's poem is focusing on Davis's attempt to quit using drugs or perhaps even a rejection of a certain lifestyle. Keep in mind that heroin was so ingrained in jazz culture and New York City when Davis lived there that quitting was no easy matter.  

 

But reading through Keene's poem, we're witnessing him reflecting on some of his past troubling behavior. At one point, he goes, 

you recall 

how astonishing and cruel you once were 

towards your elders and peers, still are, tearing 

out thirds from Bird and Diz’s circle, 

cutting lesser trumpeters, scolding Trane,  

Does Davis's recognition of this behavior here indicate that he considers rejecting it? 

Finally, listen: if we're talking John Keene, jazz poets, and religion, then we definitely have to go way back and mention Ted Joans's poem "Jazz is My Religion." Joans is celebrating jazz and citing all these various musicians. His poem anticipates Baraka's poem "Digging," which name checks more than 50 jazz artists. From Joans to Baraka to Keene, we get this sense from some poets that jazz is a holy endeavor.  

Related:

• A Notebook on the work of John Keene

Blade, Vampire Hunter

Our newest episode of Remarkable Receptions focuses on Blade, Vampire Hunter.

The episode was written by Stephyn Phillips.

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

From Fenton Johnson to William J. Harris: 100 Black Poets in Poetry

In February, Poetry magazine will publish several poems by William J. Harris. Thinking about his first appearance prompted me to consider the first year appearance in the magazine of 99 other Black poets. 

Below, I arranged the list (not exhaustive by the way) based on the year of poets' first appearance in Poetry. 

 

1918: Fenton Johnson

1924: Countee Cullen

1926: Langston Hughes 

1937: Margaret Walker 

1938: Sterling A. Brown 

1943: Robert Hayden 

1944: Gwendolyn Brooks 

1950: Melvin B. Tolson 

1952: Margaret Danner 

1962: Amiri Baraka 

1968: Michael S. Harper 

1969: Calvin Forbes 

1980: Ai 1981 Rita Dove 

1992: Elizabeth Alexander 

1992: Reginald Shepherd 

1993: Kevin Young 

1997: Yusef Komunyakaa 

1998: Derek Walcott 

2005: Marilyn Nelson 

2006: Thylias Moss 

2006: Thomas Sayers Ellis 

2006: Major Jackson 

2007: Lucille Clifton 

2007: Patricia Smith 

2007: Afaa Michael Weaver 

2008: Terrance Hayes 

2008: Roger Reeves 

2008: Fred D'Aguiar 

2011: Camille T. Dungy 

2011: Reginald Dwayne Betts 

2011: Marcus Wicker 

2012: Rickey Laurentiis 

2012: Adrian Matejka 

A Checklist of Anthologies featuring Black Writings, 1967 - 1976

Here's a checklist of anthologies featuring African American poetry, short fiction, novel and autobiography excerpts, plays, song lyrics, and more. 

[Related visualization: The Proliferation of Black Literature Anthologies, 1965 – 1976]

• 1967: Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets edited by Robert Hayden
• 1967: For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs 

• 1967: The Best Short Stories by Black writers: The Classic Anthology from 1899-1967 edited by Langston Hughes
• 1968: An Introduction to Black Literature in America from 1746 to the Present edited by Lindsay Patterson
• 1968: Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing edited by LeRoi and Larry Neal Jones
• 1968: Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature edited by Abraham Chapman
• 1968: Chronicles of Negro Protest: A Background Book for Young People, Documenting the History of Black Power edited by Bradford Chambers
• 1968: Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore Gross
• 1968: I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans edited by Arnold Adoff
• 1968: Nine Black Poets edited by Robert Baird Shuman
• 1968: Ten: An Anthology of Detroit Poets
• 1968: The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays edited by Floyd B. Barbour
• 1968: Watts Poets: A Book of New Poetry and Essays edited by Quincy Troupe
• 1969: Black American Literature: Essays edited by Darwin T. Turner
• 1969: Black American Literature: Poetry edited by Darwin T. Turner
• 1969: Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations edited by Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara
• 1969: Black Expression: Essays By and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts edited by Addison Gayle
• 1969: Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets edited byDudley Randall
• 1969: Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto edited by Sam Cornish and Lucian W. Dixon
• 1969: Chronicles of Negro Protest: A Background Book for Young People, Documenting the History of Black Power edited by Bradford Chambers
• 1969: City in All Directions; an Anthology of Modern Poems edited by Arnold Adoff

From book and article authors to scriptwriters

I initially thought of Courtney Thorsson as the author of a book on Black women's writing, along articles on African American literature. The same with Keith Clark, Alisha Knight, Richard Schur, and others. 

But working on our podcast Remarkable Receptions created an opportunity where book and article authors could become scriptwriters. 

Scholars of African American literature write monographs, articles for scholarly journals and edited collections, book reviews, and conference papers. Surely we could also write podcast scripts, right? That question kept coming to me as I started forming the ideas that would become Remarkable Receptions.

Writing for listeners and a general public is different, I think, than the kinds of scholarly writing that people in our field typically do. It's common and sometimes expected to provide extensive citations in scholarly writing. But not so much in the kinds of scripts we were producing.

For scholarly publications, the assumption is that the majority of the audience consists of scholars. I assume that a podcast draws in far more general listeners.   

My co-editor Elizabeth Cali and I also realized that there are many specialized terms and ways of speaking that emerge in literary studies. So, for instance, we promoted our scholarly authors turned scriptwriters to mention books and novels rather than "texts," a pervasive term for publications in our field.    

We also encouraged our scriptwriters to think of themselves as storytellers more than is perhaps common in the field of American and African American literary studies. Many people who listen to podcasts are interested in stories and memorable people or characters.    

Thorsson is of course still an author, but now she's also a podcast scriptwriter. So are Clark, Knight, Schur, and others.

Related:

• Notes on the production of Remarkable Receptions

The educational lives of black boys

I've just started reading Adin Levy's biography Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (2022), and I immediately thought of some other biographies on black men I've read over the years. In particular, I recalled scenes from Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007), David Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018), and Les Payne's The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (2020). 

I realized that one benefit in the early parts of these biographies is that you get the chance to consider childhoods of this folks who went on to live these extraordinary lives. I've been thinking and writing about the intellectual lives of black men for quite some time, and these biographies give me opportunities to think about he cognitive development of black boys.  I saw that with Douglass, Ellison, and Malcolm. And now Rollins. 

Oh, I thought about some of that too with Lewis Porter's fantastic biography, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (1998). In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Ta-Nehisi Coates devotes most of this one chapter to discussing his dad's upbringing, and so that comes to mind too. 

Levy takes us to Rollins' childhood, growing up in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. The family has some struggles. There's all kind of obstacles. And Rollins is a typical little black boy hanging around, playing with friends, and being an average or so student in school. 

Ok, but then, there's the music. Look. Listen. 

Rollins is surrounded by it. He has this rich musical heritage with parents from the Caribbean. Then, he's in the right neighborhoods in Harlem getting to see folks like Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and others. He's taking music lessons, as an early teen, with experienced musicians. By 13, he's starting to play with groups. 

He's watching performances at the Apollo. He figures out ways to sneak into jazz clubs downtown. He's interacting with all these other future jazz musicians. 

I want to eventually think through and say more about the educational lives of black boys -- those who became famous and also just in general. 

For now, it's exciting to consider the environment that nurtured Sonny Rollins. 

Related:

• Reading Aidan Levy's Saxophone Colossus 

Reading Aidan Levy's Saxophone Colossus

Over the next month or so, I'm reading Aidan Levy's Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (2022). At nearly 800 pages, not including references and notes, it's a massive book, so it'll take me a while to read. I'll try to provide some of my running notes and reflections, if I have time and remember to post. 

Entries:

• The educational lives of black boys 

Working with Kassandra Timm, a talented voice actor

In the process of developing this podcast project Remarkable Receptions, we knew we wanted voice actors to read our scripts. After looking through dozens of options on Fiverr, I found, almost by chance, this voice actor Kassandra Timm. 

I view her as one of our great discoveries for this project. 

It's rare for a group of literary scholars to work with voice actors. Besides, don't people do their own speaking for their podcasts? Well, I wanted to remove as many barriers as possible when recruiting scholars to contribute, and I knew that giving them just the one job of providing a short script would be a plus. Early on  though, I also realized that voice actors could produce a higher quality product than most of us.  

I initially requested one short voiceover assignment from Timm. She would complete the job, and I'd continue identifying other voice actors. Her professionalism and efficiency, though, were really impressive. She posed useful clarifying questions that I hadn't considered, and she then quickly produced a really solid composition. She added life to the words on the page. 

I requested her assistance on another project and then another one and then several others. She ended up doing the voiceovers for more than half of our 53 episodes. She demonstrates versatility with her pace and reading style, and she changes the intensity of her voice to draw readers in to our scripts.  

She always sends us high-quality recordings -- far superior than the ones we could make ourselves. 

We send Timm a script, she takes some time to review it and see if she has any questions, and then she sends an order sheet. Before recording, she provides a brief questionnaire that prompts us to describe the kind of reading approaches we'd like her to take. 

You can hear her describing our project on this brief trailer for the podcast. Or, you can check out any of the following episodes:

    • Richard Wright's infamous review

    • The Sisterhood, 1977 photograph

    • Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

    • The Color Purple film adaptation

    • The 50th Episode of Remarkable Receptions

We're looking forward to producing more episodes. 

Related:

• Notes on the production of Remarkable Receptions

Notes on the production of Remarkable Receptions

Here are entries about elements and production processes of our podcast Remarkable Receptions.

Entries

• Reflections on 200 podcast episodes

• An origin story for Remarkable Receptions podcast

• This episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali

• Broadcasting African American literary studies

• From book and article authors to scriptwriters

• Podcasting and African American literary studies

• Working with Kassandra Timm, a talented voice actor  

Categories of episodes 

• Novels and Novelists

• Toni Morrison 

• Comic books and Graphic Novels

• Black voice actors and audiobooks

• Film, Casting, and Novel adaptations

• Groups of Black Writers

• Black Women Writers

• Various topics

• Literary Data Work

Episodes:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

• Episodes (by topics) of Remarkable Receptions

• The Black Literature Network 

A select checklist of works by Trudier Harris

I've been working with my brother Kenton Rambsy on projects related to Trudier Harris. To give a sense of her amazing productivity, I'm providing a select list of publications across several decades.

[Related: A brief visual take on Trudier Harris’s Prolific Scholarship]

2021: Depictions of Home in African American Literature. 

2021:  “Image Shatterer: Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child,” in Mothers Who Kill.

2020: “Grandmothers, Culture, and Legacies.” Tribute to Randall Kenan in The Mississippi Quarterly. 

2019: “When Art Devolves Into Horniness and Pimping: Reflections Upon Questionable Creativity in Ntozake Shange’s ‘a photograph: lovers in motion’” CLA Journal. 

2019: “When Art Devolves Into Horniness and Pimping: Reflections Upon Questionable Creativity in Ntozake Shange’s ‘a photograph: lovers in motion’”; CLA Journal.  

2019: “Aun’ Peggy: Charles Chesnutt’s Vampire Slayer?” North Carolina Literary Review. 

2018: “Aborted Rituals of Communion: Food as Drugs and Drugs as Food in Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds

2017: “‘My Story Is Better Than Yours’: The Changing Politics of and Motives for Composing Southern African American Life Narratives,” in Constructing the Self: Essays on Southern Life Writing. 

2017: Alice Walker’s ‘Roselily’: Mediations on Culture, Politics, and Chains,” The Southern Quarterly. 

2014: Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature. 

2013:  “Untangling History, Dismantling Fear: Teaching Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta,” Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon.

2012: “Nikki Giovanni: Literary Survivor Across Centuries,” Appalachian Heritage.

2012: “The Terrible Pangs of Compromise: Racial Reconciliation in African American Literature,” The Cresset. 

2011: “Mama Lena Is an Acceptable Tyrant,” in Gender and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. 

2011: “History as Fact and Fiction” for the Cambridge History of African American Literature.

2009: “The Yellow Rose of Texas: A Different Cultural View.” Callaloo.

2009: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. 

2009: “Cotton Pickin’ Authority,” in Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers.

2008: “Back Talk: Smacked Upside the Head—Again.” African American Review. 

2005: “William Melvin Kelley’s Real Live, Invisible South,” South Central Review.

2003: Summer Snow: Reflections on Being Black and Southern. 

2002: South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. 

2001: Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature.

2001: “James Baldwin,” The Oxford Companion to United States History.

1996: “Porch-Sitting as a Creative Southern Tradition,” in Southern Cultures. 

1996: The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. 

1995: “Adventures in a ‘Foreign Country’: African American Humor and the South,” Southern Humor Issue of Southern Cultures.  

1995: “Genre”—for “Keywords” special issue of the Journal of American Folklore.

1995: “‘This Disease Called Strength’: Some Observations on the Compensating Construction of Black Female Character,” Literature and Medicine.

1994: “Toni Morrison: Solo Flight Through Literature and History,” World Literature Today. 

1993: “‘Africanizing the Audience’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Transformation of White Folks in Mules and Men,” The Zora Neale Hurston Forum.

1991: Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. 

1990: "Native Sons and Foreign Daughters,” New Essays on Native Son.

1988: “Moms Mabley: A Study in Humor, Role Playing, and the Violation of Taboo,” The Southern Review.

1986: “From Victimization to Free Enterprise: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” Studies in American Fiction.

1985: Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. 

1984: “The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor,” Southern Changes.

1984: Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals.

1983: “No Outlet for the Blues: Silla Boyce's Plight in Brown Girl, Brownstones,” Callaloo.

1982: “Tiptoeing Through Taboo: Incest in Alice Walker’s ‘The Child Who Favored Daughter’,” Modern Fiction Studies. 

1982: “A Different Image of the Black Woman,” Callaloo.

1982: From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. 

1982: “A Spiritual Journey: Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho,” Callaloo.

1978: “Telephone Pranks: A Thriving Pastime,” Journal of Popular Culture.

1977: “Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker—A Perpetuation of Historical and Literary Traditions,” Black American Literature Forum.

1975: “Ellison’s ‘Peter Wheatstraw’: His Basis in Black Folk Tradition,” Mississippi Folklore Register.

1975: “Violence in The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” CLA Journal. 

1975: “Ceremonial Fagots: Lynching and Burning Rituals in Black American Literature,” Southern Humanities Review.

Related:

• Trudier Harris’s Prolific Single-Author Studies

• Trudier Harris's MLK book in the context of a remarkable career

• "'I'm a student of Trudier Harris': Lovalerie King & that generation of exemplary black women lit. scholars

Blogging about poetry in December 2022

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• December 28: The year in African American poetry, 2022

• December 1: Blogging about poetry in November 2022