If you are applying to graduate school in English and do not want to study anything other than Black Studies, you shouldn’t waste your time on an application to the University of Chicago. Here is an announcement on the department’s […]
African American literature
Teaching Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
On Monday we wrapped-up the “Creation” unit in Created and Called for Community. I began the class with a review. Over the last two weeks we read: Genesis 1 and 2 Bruce Birch’s theological commentary on Genesis 1-3: “The Image […]
Teaching James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation”
Yesterday in my Created and Called for Community (CCC) class at Messiah College we discussed James Weldon Johnson‘s poem “The Creation” (1922). It is one of seven poems in his 1927 collection God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Read […]
George Moses Horton’s Recently Discovered Prose
George Moses Horton was an African-American poet enslaved in Chatham County, North Carolina. Jonathan Senchyne, a book historian at the University of Wisconsin, has discovered a previously unknown essay by Horton entitled “Individual Influence.” Learn more about Horton and this new […]
Phillis Wheatley: “On Virtue”
Michael Monescalchi is a graduate student in English at Rutgers University. Over at Common-place he reflects on Phillis Wheatley‘s poem “On Virtue” and her engagement with the theology of Jonathan Edwards. Monescalchi writes: “Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can […]
The Author’s Corner with Eric Gardner
Eric Gardner is Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. This interview is based on his most recent book, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford UP, 2015). JF: What led you to write […]