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| Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt making announcements at the NEH Black Poetry Institute, July 2015 |
A few months back, I heard something surprising. Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt, the longtime program coordinator/budget director/planner for the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW), told me that she didn’t even live in Lawrence, Kansas during the time of all those successful NEH institutes run by Maryemma Graham at the University of Kansas.
Sarah was commuting from somewhere else.
But whenever we, the participants, arrived for the day’s events, Sarah always was already there. Folks stopped by the table where she sat to ask questions about anything and everything: payments, lodging details, transportation, the room temperature, even (no lie) how to get a particular brand of bubble bath, etc.
We’d formally refer to Sarah as a program coordinator or administrator, but on a practical level, for our everyday needs, wants, and dilemmas, we viewed her as a... no, we viewed her as the problem-solver extraordinaire.
She played that role for the 2015 institute, and before that the 2013 institute, and before that the 2010 one. She also held lead administrative roles for a program from 2015 to 2019, and then again for a separate program between 2021 and 2024.
For each of those projects, somewhere out there is a final report or white paper. Sarah wrote or co-wrote those documents or gathered the necessary materials to make them happen. She rarely signed her name, instead attributing the reports to “HBW staff” or the broader team of project contributors.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, how much invisible labor supports major African American literary studies projects. Sometimes that labor takes the form of program coordination. Sometimes it’s editorial work. Sometimes, it’s meetings, documentation, or the quiet organizing that holds everything together without ever demanding the spotlight.
It's worth thinking about how this invisible work facilitates African American literary studies.
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