Discovering Creativity Research

Several years ago, I discovered the field of creativity research. Like many people, I had always been thinking about creativity, yet not necessarily in a formal way. I certainly hadn't thought enough about scholarly articles and journals and key books in the field.

In some ways, I guess it seems odd that scholars of African American literature don't focus as much on creativity as a field of knowledge. We acknowledge creative works, but I also realized that black literary scholars and scholars of creativity research hardly interact. Maybe they're unaware of each other. 

I had a good time and benefited reading works by several scholars in the field of creativity research such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Dean Keith Simonton, Keith Sawyer, Robert Sternberg, Sandra W. Russ, Emily C. Nusbaum, and Mark Runco. I also spent quite a bit of time reading journals like Journal of Creative Behavior and the Creativity Research Journal.

So some of those ideas were in my mind as I remained grounded in the scholarship on black literature. 

During the course of writing my book, I enjoyed thinking of myself as a scholar of African American literary studies and creativity research. 

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This entry is part of a series--28 Days & Ways of Thinking about Bad Men & Vulnerable Black Boys.

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