Blobbing about Poetry in July 2026

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• July 31: Amiri Baraka, Walter Evans, and Causal Connections

• July 1: Blogging about Poetry in June 2026

Amiri Baraka, Walter Evans, and Causal Connections

Back in late June, I traveled to Georgia and spent time with Walter O. Evans, who I view as our greatest African American collector. Later, I'll write about his materials (artwork, books, letters, various artifacts). For now, I wanted to mention something related to Amiri Baraka.

Evans was talking to me and at some point about his time at Howard University from 1964 - 1968, and in passing he mentioned Baraka coming on campus or perhaps one of Baraka's plays appearing on campus. It was our second day of talking, and somehow I hadn't mentioned to Evans that Baraka was one of my central research subjects. So now when I mentioned it, Evans started telling me an interesting story about Baraka.

At some point, perhaps in 2000, Baraka gave a talk or reading at Wayne State University and was joined by a small group. After his reading, Evans who was still living in Detroit at the time approached Baraka and told him about his collection and convinced Baraka that he would want to see it. Baraka and his group took Evans up on his invitation, so after finishing up at Wayne State, they went to Evans's home, where they did like me and discussed the collection. Evans has since moved to Savannah. 

I want to pause for a second to note how fascinating it is that Evans would attend a Baraka reading and then go up to him after and say something to the effect of, "I have a great collection of African American works at my home, you and your group will want to see it." 

Evans told me that he initially been shy growing up, but as a young man, he went out of his way to travel to Jamaica and meet Amy Garvey, Marcus Garvey's widow. After meeting her and realizing that it was possible to approach and learn from authors and artists, he did so regularly. He hosted Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Margaret Walker, Oliver Harrington, and others at his home in Detroit. 

In the process, he also build a massive collection of books, paintings, letters, and other artifacts. He says he was interested in charting "the Black experience." 

Evans has several Baraka books, and apparently got some of them signed when Baraka visited Evana's home. Later, Evans joined his friend Les Payne on a visit to Baraka's home in Newark. There, Evans got more Baraka books signed.  

One signature reads: 

For Walt—
Be Strong
for the world is
weak, but
find out the
"causal connections"
of that world or
it will be impossible.
Best,
Baraka
9/00

The phrase "causal connections" appears in Marxist discourse and refers to understanding the underlying social, economic, and historical forces that produce inequality and class struggle. In his inscription, Baraka seems to be encouraging Evans to consider deeper structures and relationships that shape it. Given Evans's interest in associations between authors, I was especially attentive to Baraka's use of "causal connections."

Related:

• The Intellectual Versatility of Our Greatest Collector

The Intellectual Versatility of Our Greatest Collector

Phillis Wheatley, Augusta Savage, Malcolm X

Nineteenth-century African American paintings. Autographed books. Rare coins. Scrapbooks. Letters from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner. Letters written by Malcolm X while incarcerated. Correspondence from Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence to friends and colleagues. Sculptures. Rare stamps. A suitcase bearing the initials "G. E. J.," once owned by Grace Elizabeth Nail Johnson, the wife of James Weldon Johnson. Collector Walter O. Evans has it all.

Initially, after receiving a guided tour of his massive collections, my impression was that Evans stands as our greatest collector of African American art, books, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts. I still believe that. What I had not been able to fully articulate until recently, however, was the remarkable intellectual versatility that accounts for his ability to assemble such an expansive and interconnected collection.

He could have devoted himself exclusively to paintings. He could have made rare books his singular focus. He could have concentrated on manuscripts or correspondence. Instead, by continually pursuing what he calls "the Black experience," Evans was inspired to collect across categories and to recognize meaningful relationships among seemingly disparate objects.

He learned early on to value association copies. He sought artifacts that connected important people to one another: a book inscribed by one renowned figure to another; a work of art created by a celebrated sculptor for a distinguished painter; letters that documented intellectual and artistic networks. Augusta Savage, for example, sculpted a bust of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, the wife of Jacob Lawrence. Evans owned two casts of the bust—one that he kept in his home and another that he donated to the Telfair Museums.

From the late 1970s through the 1990s, while working as a surgeon in Detroit and simultaneously building this extraordinary collection, Evans was effectively pursuing an independent curriculum in African American visual art, literary history, collecting practices, and Black social history. Each acquisition expanded not only his holdings but also his understanding of the relationships among artists, writers, activists, institutions, and communities. The collection became an intellectual map of the Black experience, a trove of cultural artifacts. 

In the process of building this extraordinary collection was a nimble mind, a wide-ranging reader, and an outgoing communicator. The quality that united those traits, and ultimately made the collection possible, was intellectual versatility.

SIUE scholar’s new book explores cultural and literary impact of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Black Panther’

from St. Public Radio

 

In 2016, acclaimed Black American author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates entered the field of comic books with "Black Panther #1." It met with both fanfare and critique. In a new book, Howard Rambsy II argues that Coates’ take on the superhero story raised the profile and understanding of comics as an art form and affected opportunity for other Black writers. Rambsy, a literature professor at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, also talks about the ways Coates’ work illuminated the challenges of "attaining" representation in the comic book field.

Related: Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles

Books in Brief

Books in Brief is an ongoing series featuring concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies. Each installment begins with a brief description of the book and then invites the author to reflect on the project's inspiration, writing process, and place within the field.

• Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles by Howard Rambsy II

Books in Brief: Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles by Howard Rambsy II

About the Book

Publication: 2026

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic 

A timely look at contemporary African American creative works through the lens of Ta-Nehisi Coates's ground-breaking entry into the comic book industry.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
On the one hand, I’ve been interested in Coates’s work for quite some time, and on the other hand, I have an interest in comic books. I realized that by merging those interests, I could usefully contribute to African American literary studies.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
I hadn't fully considered that writing comic books unlocked dimensions of Coates's creativity in a wide range of ways. He's understandably famous for his nonfiction, but I was surprised, and ultimately motivated to write this book, by how essential comics became to showcasing his imagination and storytelling abilities.

3. What part of this project took the longest to figure out?
The hardest decision was figuring out the book's overall organization. I went through roughly 70 versions of the table of contents, experimenting with different structures before arriving at a ten-chapter, loosely chronological approach.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
I made a conscious effort to present my findings earlier and more incrementally than is typical in literary scholarship. Too often, we postpone central insights until well into a chapter or even near the end of a book, seemingly unaware that many audiences prefer early insights and a clear sense of where the discussion is headed.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
Although I don't cite them in the book, I continually found myself thinking about Courtney Thorsson's The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (2023) and Elizabeth McHenry's To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (2021). Thorsson's project, which is inspired in part by a single photograph, modeled for me how one compelling object can anchor a larger scholarly argument, while McHenry continues to show how careful attention to archival and seemingly subtle sources can produce transformative literary history. I also kept returning to Farah Jasmine Griffin's Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (2021), especially during the many hours I spent reading and rereading Black Panther comics.

Blogging about Poetry in June 2026

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• June 6: Mapping the Remarkable Literary Career of Elizabeth Alexander

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The Consistency of Walter Mosley

By Elizabeth Cali 

Walter Mosley is consistent. Search the Navigator Device for 21st-century novels, and it is impossible to overlook how frequently Mosley’s name comes up. I wondered, just in 21st century novel publications, how consistently Mosley published across the first two decades of this century. Did he have a strong entry into the new century and perhaps did his productivity wane some in the 2010s, or vice versa?

Thirty of Walter Mosley’s 21st-century novels were published in the 2000s and 2010s. It is striking that his novelistic output in the 2000s is equal to his novelistic output in the 2010s. 15 novels published in each of the first two decades of the 21st century.

Mosley stands out in part due to the significant number of novels he has published, but the consistency, the even-ness with which he has published in the first two decades of this century prompts further consideration. We might consider how many of those novels are part of the Easy Rawlins series or the Leonid McGill series, for which Mosley is known. Does authoring a series lend itself to greater productivity, for example? What about the novels that are not part of a series? Do these lead to significant departures in topics, themes, genre, or plot?

Such significant and consistent output allows readers to ask more pointed questions about the layers of both consistency and variation in theme, genre, protagonists, settings, and structure that take place within and across such a steady, remarkable output of imaginative writing. And, notably, the rarity in having such a volume of regular creative production from one author is that that when readers ask questions about Mosely’s storytelling and fiction writing patterns, trends, variations, and creative flights, they’ll have significant data to back up their answers.

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• Navigator Discoveries