Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige in Context

As I began reading Pitfalls of Prestige, I started thinking about how Laura Vrana's book connects to various other projects on poetry and African American artistic writing in general.

Oh, well, first, I want to make it clear that we simply do not have enough scholarly writing on Black poetry. That's especially clear when consider book publications in African American literary studies over the last two decades. Overall, there's been tremendous output in the field, but not necessarily on poetry. 

So Vrana's book is a welcome addition to an area that needs even more contributors. Pitfalls of Prestige extends treatments of Black women's poetry that we saw in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011) by Evie Shockley and The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2011) by Meta DuEwa Jones. And more recently, there's Introduction to Claudia Rankine (2023) by Kathy Lou Schultz.

Over the last decade or so, we've had a few books on African American poetry, including The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka ((2013) by Schultz , Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014) and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (2021) by Anthony Reed, A History of African American Poetry (2019) by Lauri Scheyer, The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka (2021) by Aldon Nielsen, Revolutionary Poetics: The Rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement (2023) by Sarah RudeWalker, and Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (2024) by Ryan Sharp. 

It's a different kind of history, but the attention to the careers and works of Black women writers in Pitfalls of Prestige connects in important ways to The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (2023) by Courtney Thorsson.

 Vrana's research and writing aligns with some of the work that people have been doing on awards. Most notably, I'm thinking of works on the subject by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman. I've tried to contribute to this conversation as well. Collectively, our work build on James English's The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2008). You'll note the prestige in English's and Vrana's titles. 

To varying degrees, Vrana's work is also in conversation with Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020), and Dan Sinykin's "How Capitalism Changed American Literature" and Sinykin and Edwin Roland's "Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980." That is, Vrana, like those other folks, is addressing aspects of the publishing industry. Along these lines, there's also John B. Thompson's Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, which Vrana cites. 

Related:

• Laura Vrana's Pitfalls of Prestige