Literary Criticism

The Tales Of Miles Grey goes deep into many real-life challenges faced in inner-city Brooklyn. Through the experiences of this young man trying to break free of his rough environment, light is shed on the impact fathers and mentors hold in becoming the...

With this appreciation of three very different black writers, novelist Darryl Pinckney reminds us that marginal or neglected literary figures have a lot to tell us about the history of a people who are always outsiders. Born in Jamaica in 1883, J. A...

Poetry. OUR ONE-WAY STREET is a series of poetic snapshots of a working-class neighborhood and its quirky inhabitants. Schumejda zooms the lens in and out on herself as well as neighbors trying to make it through the day in hopes of a better tomorrow...

This first volume of poetry established Walker as a poet of unusual sensitivity and power. All of the poems in this collection were written either in East Africa, where Walker spent the summer of 1965, or during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College...

Within a rich cultural and political context, Miller proposes that as the centuries turned and the nation became more diverse, the great Chicago Renaissances-especially the literary and cultural ones-never really ended. The nation's cities simply became...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our...

In meditative and passionate prose, these provocative essays explore feminist, environmental, and political issues and shed new light on racial debates, including the controversy surrounding Walker's bestseller, The Color Purple.

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are...

The Limba are rice farmers living in the hills of northern Sierra Leone who have, until recently, been somewhat despised by their neighbours. Yet they possess a subtle and fascinating literature, as illustrated by this detailed study of their stories,...

Concentrating on carefully chosen selections from ten writers, Mary Helen Washington explores the work, the realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860 and 1960. Featuring works by Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E...

What is positive Black masculinity? Who should define it? Khefa Nosakhere's first nonfiction book, Institutional racism and the search for African American masculinity and identity in selected works of Richard Wright is a multi layered analysis of how...

Two years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever...

The most successful African-American playwright of his time, August Wilson is a dominant presence on Broadway and in regional theaters throughout the country. Herrington traces the roots of Wilson's drama back to the visual artists and jazz musicians who...

How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse offers a much needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as "What does it mean to work through resistance...