The Organizational Brilliance of Ada Jackson and Gabrielle Wallen

Let’s get one thing straight: the organizational expertise of Ada Jackson and Gabrielle Wallen have been understudied and deserve far more recognition.

Jackson and Wallen work for the UNCF/Mellon Programs under the directorship of Cynthia Spence, and they recently coordinated the program's annual conference. I've long noticed and benefited from their organizational expertise, but until now, I've somehow failed to document the remarkable work they do behind the scenes.

Maybe that's because too many of us take such work for granted. Maybe it's because we tend to focus on the people on stage rather than those who make the stage possible. Maybe and hopefully, as my dear mentor Jerry Ward would say, it's not too late.

Their work is all around us, and at the same time, it seems invisible, simply because people refuse to see it. Thanks, Ellison, we heard you. This year, after working with colleagues to organize a few mini-workshops at my university, I've become even more inclined to seek out and pay close attention to expert organizers like Jackson and Wallen. It took just about every one of my brain cells to assist in pulling together a gathering of approximately 10 advanced graduate students and scholars.

Well, Jackson and Wallen coordinated a conference involving more than 10 times as many people. And they've been doing this kind of work year after year.

Spence, Jackson, and Wallen have developed an impressive pre-conference process. Months in advance, they send a "save the date" email to their expansive network. Next come the follow-ups, inviting people to express interest and register. Meanwhile, Spence is working her network, reaching out to people at smaller institutions who may not have attended previously, as well as colleagues across the country whom she hopes to bring into the gathering.

Jackson and Wallen then begin the complicated work of coordinating with attendees. They arrange flights, lodging, and dietary accommodations. Somewhere in the background, they're also organizing airport shuttles and transportation between conference locations.

At the same time, the team is developing the conference program, refining the central topic, identifying keynote speakers, and arranging concurrent panels. All these moving parts require countless decisions, communications, and adjustments long before anyone arrives.

By the time we attendees show up, we encounter the results of months of careful planning. An undergraduate assistant welcomes us, provides name badges, and distributes conference materials. There's a packet with the schedule and other essential information. You attend enough conferences, and you begin to take these things for granted.

But Spence, Jackson, and Wallen go beyond the basics. They take special care to ensure that the conference gift bags contain things attendees can actually use. A portable phone charger. A really nice journal. Thoughtful items that make the experience more convenient and enjoyable. They're all about the details.

And then there are the meals. Their conferences have a high standard for hospitality. Years ago, during one gathering, I overheard a hotel manager apologizing to Spence because something had fallen short of expectations. I hadn't noticed anything wrong, but from his apology, I could tell that he understood she had distinct standards and that he and his staff had not met them. Spence was gracious and understanding. Without realizing it, she was giving me several lessons at once about leadership, accountability, and professionalism.

At the close of the conference, Jackson and Wallen are still moving around, making sure everyone knows when their airport shuttles are scheduled to depart. We load onto the buses, and when the final shuttle pulls away, there they are, waving and bidding us farewell.

From the earliest planning emails to the departure of the final guests, Jackson and Wallen are there, attending to details, solving problems, and making everything look easier than it is. Their organizational brilliance deserves to be seen, studied, and celebrated.

Related 

• Notebook on UNCF-Mellon Conferences

The Value of Giving Away Books

Free books can play an important role in expanding access to scholarship and circulating ideas.

Thanks to the generosity of Cynthia Spence and her crew, dozens of attendees at the recent UNCF/Mellon conference received free copies of either my book Writing Black Panther or One Black Writer at a Time, which I co-wrote with my brother Kenton, and it was especially rewarding to see people carrying the books throughout the gathering.

Kenton and I also gave a presentation about our book and how we arrived at the topic, while the distribution of free copies reinforced an important point: removing the cost of academic books creates more opportunities for people to encounter scholarship, engage with new ideas, and participate in conversations they might otherwise miss.

Related 

• Notebook on UNCF-Mellon Conferences

Notebook on UNCF-Mellon Conferences

2026

• The Value of Giving Away Books

2024

• The Spence Tree: Charting UNCF-Mellon PhDs and EdDs

• Data Storytelling and the UNCF-Mellon Program 

• UNCF-Mellon & Career Possibilities 

• The Diverse Career Paths of UNCF Mellon Fellows 

• Transforming Academia: The Impact of Mellon Fellows from HBCUs 

• Tracking 21 Books by UNCF-Mellon Fellows 

• UNCF-Mellon English Majors & PhDs

2022

• UNCF/Mellon: "Answering the Call to Transform the Academy"

2019 

• UNCF/Mellon Program celebrates 30 years

• Scenes from the UNCF/Mellon Conference (2019)

The Confidence and Concerns of Black Men College Readers

By Albert Smith

Black men college students express confidence in their ability to concentrate while reading, even as many identify maintaining focus as a significant challenge.

Among the 108 first-year Black men student readers surveyed 57% of the students agreed that they could stay focused while reading for thirty minutes or longer and 39% of these same students acknowledged that staying focused while reading was a college reading concern.

These statistics suggest that a fair number of these students worry that their attention span is substandard to college level reading, but that they also identify themselves as focused readers. This discrepancy may seem contrary at face value but could offer a look into the awareness that these students have about their reading abilities and habits.

Creating more opportunities for uninterrupted reading could help these students recognize and further develop their capacity for extended concentration.

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

To #Booktok or not to #Booktok

By Kai Steward

Social media and other digital platforms play an important role in introducing college students to new reading materials.

Among the 214 first-year Black women students surveyed, over 20 percent of students were led to reading something new from social media while another 14 percent indicated podcasts, videos, or various modes of media. These results highlight the different ways that students encounter books and other reading materials through digital platforms.

The findings suggest that digital media provide important opportunities for students to discover books and other reading materials beyond traditional classroom settings. Online recommendations, videos, and podcasts can introduce students to books they might not otherwise encounter while offering educators new ways to encourage reading.

The finding raises a larger question for us: Can social media be used as a tool to better inform students about books/encouragement to read?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

What Makes Reading Difficult for Students?

By Joyce Woodard

When 322 students were asked what their biggest college-reading concern was, the most selected answer for GAME was staying focused while reading, while understanding difficult texts was the most selected answer for FAME.

Given how much time students spend on devices, it’s no wonder they are concerned that they will become distracted or disinterested while reading for class. FAME students’ concern about not understanding difficult texts points to a different challenge. FAME students worry they won’t fully comprehend and interpret what they read; this difference highlights the different approaches students take to reading.

These findings show that students know the material they will be reading requires a different level of engagement and effort.

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Where Zora Neale Hurston Gives Delia a Voice in “Sweat”

By Jade Harrison

 
Delia Jones speaks nearly 20% more than her husband, Sykes, when they are in her kitchen in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), revealing that a woman largely silenced elsewhere in the story gains a stronger voice in a distinct space.

Delia speaks 544 words to her Sykes’s 456, a difference of 88 words. The variation is striking because, across the story as a whole, Sykes actually speaks slightly more than Delia, 637 words to 622. Outside Delia’s kitchen, dialogue is dominated by men, including conversations of a group of men gathered on a porch.

In her kitchen, Delia stakes her claim to the entire house, telling Sykes, “Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it.” On Joe Clarke’s porch, by contrast, Joe Lindsay describes her life as a washerwoman for the other men: “Hot or col’, rain or shine, je sez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun’ Delia carries ‘em an’ fetches ‘em on Sat’day.”

Tracing where characters speak, not just what they say, reveals how Hurston uses setting to shape who gets heard, who gets silenced, and who holds power.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

The Majority Black Blocks in Edward P. Jones's Stories

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones’s stories preserve a literary record of Black people and places in Washington, D.C., allowing readers to revisit neighborhoods that have changed dramatically over the last half century.

I matched the 403 DC places Jones names in his two story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), to census records. The neighborhoods around those places lost their Black majorities faster than the city overall. In 1970, 70 percent of his places sat in majority Black neighborhoods, about the same as the 72 percent of DC neighborhoods that were majority Black. By 2020, only 20 percent of the neighborhoods around Jones’s places were majority Black, compared with 37 percent citywide.

Literary geotagging, that is, tracking the real places a writer names and connecting them to geographic data, helps reveal changes that are difficult to see from the stories alone. Jones makes this approach especially productive because his characters live on named streets, shop at named stores, and travel through identifiable neighborhoods. With my research assistants, the Data Rangers, I annotated these places and connected them to Open Data D.C. census records across several decades.

Half the settings in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” from Lost in the City fall on one block of Myrtle Street NE, a street the city closed in the 1960s. That neighborhood was 81 percent Black in 1950 and 18 percent Black in 2020.

In the title story, Lydia Walsh’s cab passes the Ridge Street block where her family lived. It was 95 percent Black around 1980, when the story is set, and 43 percent Black by 2020.

The census counts who left. Jones’s help us imagine and remember what life was like on those blocks.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

The Changing Black Neighborhoods of Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City

By Kenton Rambsy 

Edward P. Jones’s stories are situated in Washington, D.C., neighborhoods that were primarily Black during the periods he presents. By 2020, however, none of these four story locations constituted a majority-Black census neighborhood, which indicates the demographic transformation of the city over time.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Despite Digital Devices Young Women Students opt for Physical Media

By Albert Smith

Of 214 FAME respondents, 40% noted that their most used format when reading books are print books. Yet 79% of these young women reported that they anticipated primarily having to read on digital devices in college (smartphone, laptop, tablet, desktop computer).

This difference was particularly interesting as these readers prefer physical books, but they are mostly anticipating completing their academic related reading on digital devices. The results suggest that despite these students opting for physical media in their reading outside of class, they are ultimately expecting to engage mostly with digital media in college.

These findings offer insight into the habits of students reading on their own against what has been mapped for them in the classroom. Begging the question: How are higher education spaces adhering to the habits of their Black young women readers?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

What’s so scary about Poetry?

By Kai Steward

When 214 FAME students were asked which aspect of college reading concerns them the most, 46 percent of students were concerned about being able to understand difficult texts.

What texts are the students most concerned about? Poems. They felt much more comfortable with short stories. The results suggest that because of a lack of exposure to poetry they feel underprepared for the genre.

The findings raise the question of why poetry, even though often a shorter genre, intimidates young readers. And how can we help them feel better prepared?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Why Students Prefer Short Stories

By Joyce Woodard

When 302 FAME AND GAME students were asked what they expected to be the most enjoyable readings of the semester, the majority answered short stories.

Is this preference among the FAME and GAME classes an indication of the shortened attention spans of Gen Z? On the contrary, when the same students were asked which readings they expected to enjoy the least, most answered poems.

Considering the fact that it usually takes longer to read a short story than a poem, the preference may have nothing to do with keeping students' attention. Perhaps the issue is how the details of the readings are presented; short stories are a bit more straightforward while poems require more interpretation. The way a story is told matters and ultimately determines how excited students will feel about reading for class.

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Poet William J. Harris Inspires Successful Visual Art Activity

My decades-long conversations with poet and literary scholar William J. Harris continue to pay dividends. This week offered one of the best examples.

 
Some years back, I discovered that when Professor Harris visits museums and art shows, he sketches what he sees in notebooks. He’s not a visual artist, but he enjoys tracking and tracing what catches his attention.

 
This week, I encouraged the 300 students enrolled in my African American literary Discovery Labs to follow Harris’s model. They perused art books featuring work by Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jacob Lawrence, and others, and then spent time sketching.

 
To say it’s been a really good week based on their work would be an understatement. I had no idea so many of these students were such talented artists. Even more, I didn’t anticipate how seriously they would take the activity or how focused they would remain for extended periods.

 
We do our Discovery Lab activities in the Redmond Center, and because there are so many students, we have relatively short periods to meet. That’s usually not a problem, as students tend to complete the activity for the week and leave. This week, though, was different. More than with any previous activity, multiple students approached me and asked if they could stay longer to work on their drawings.

Black Literary Data Findings

A roundup of graphs and brief analyses of Black literary patterns.

• September 26: Beloved Reveals the Limits of “Widely Discussed"

• September 26: When One Major Novel Stands Apart

• September 25: Three Black Women Writers Stand Apart in Graduate Research

• September 25: Coates and Whitehead in Dissertation and Thesis Searches

• September 10: Tracking Beloved in Graduate Research, 1990-2025

• September 10: Toni Morrison Novels in Graduate Research: What ProQuest Reveals

• September 10: Which African American Novels Get Studied Most?

• March 11: Dissertation Citations for Six Black Women Writers, 1970–2026

• March 11: From Nine Citations to Thousands: Toni Morrison in Dissertation Research

• April 30: Amiri Baraka and Dissertations

• May 21: What ProQuest Reveals About Black Poetry Scholarship

Related:

• Black Lit Network Findings 

Beloved Reveals the Limits of “Widely Discussed"

We routinely describe several major Black novels as “widely discussed,” but that description can hide how unevenly scholarly attention is distributed among them.

 
One of the ideas I’ve been developing lately is visibility disparities among major Black novels. Richard Wright’s Native Son, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are all widely discussed.

Yet grouping them together conceals a substantial gap. From 1990 to 2025, searches for Beloved returned 4,568 dissertation and thesis results, while each of the other four novels returned more than 1,000 but fewer than 2,000. “Widely discussed” describes all five, but it does not tell us how much more often scholars return to Beloved.

When One Major Novel Stands Apart

Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Invisible Man, The Color Purple, and Beloved are all widely studied Black novels, but dissertation and thesis search results reveal a sizable gap among them. From 1990 to 2025, Beloved returned 4,568 results, more than twice as many as any of the other four.

Three Black Women Writers Stand Apart in Graduate Research

In these ProQuest One Literature searches, Edwidge Danticat returned 527 dissertation and thesis results, Zadie Smith 470, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 445. The next highest among the ten writers was Jacqueline Woodson, with 147.

Coates and Whitehead in Dissertation and Thesis Searches

In these ProQuest One Literature searches, Ta-Nehisi Coates returned 268 dissertation and thesis results and Colson Whitehead 255. The next highest among the ten writers was Teju Cole, with 145.

What Difference Does a Fast Pace Make?

I’ve been thinking about the pace of our Emerging Humanities Scholar Workshop, in part because my colleague Elizabeth Cali and I moved fairly quickly through three presentations.

Cali and I have met nearly every week for more than a decade to discuss some of these topics. We know where each other is going, and we move quickly to keep up with the next idea. In the workshop, we brought some of that rhythm into the room.

 
We also knew we were speaking with advanced scholars. We assumed they would recognize many of the situations we described, so we spent less time setting them up and more time naming patterns and offering examples. That let us cover a lot of ground.

 
Still, I wonder what a fast pace gives people and what it asks of them. It can leave less time to absorb an idea or form a question. But it can also bring energy to a presentation, make connections visible, and give people more ideas to carry away.

More Senior Scholars, More Conversations

What if more graduate students and junior professors had chances to hear from senior professors in African American literary studies?

On Friday, at the Emerging Humanities Scholar Workshop, Elizabeth Cali and I facilitated a series of mini-presentations for advanced graduate students, one junior professor, and one librarian. The gathering gave us a chance to compare experiences, respond to questions, and share ideas we’ve been developing through more than a decade of conversations.

I kept thinking about how much professional knowledge circulates informally. Scholars learn things about presenting their work, managing projects, and navigating institutions through conversations that many emerging scholars rarely get to hear.

What if opportunities like this took place across the country? I’d like to see more emerging scholars hear brief, candid presentations from senior scholars, with enough time afterward to ask the questions those presentations raise.