– Jerry Ward, Jr. wrote about seeing Richard Wright’s haiku in performance at Xavier University of Louisiana.

– Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center is sponsoring a year of Walker-centric programming, This is My Century: 100 Years of Margaret Walker, 1915-2015.

–  C. Liegh McInnis contributed to our Margaret Walker coverage with a consideration of Walker’s famous poem “For My People” as the fulfillment of her literary manifesto.

– KU English Ph.D. student Creighton N. Brown recapped Dr. Giselle Anatol’s recent talk about her new book, Things That Fly in the Night.

– We also recapped the Langston Hughes Center’s screening of Selma and its KU scholars’ panel discussion about the film.  (You can watch director Ava DuVernay’s keynote from the South by Southwest Film festival here.)

– Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher announce the publication of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference, forthcoming from Duke University Press in spring 2016.  Indonesian Notebook contains a newly discovered Indonesian lecture by Richard Wright, “The Artist and His Problems.”  (Read an excerpt of the project published in PMLA here.)

– Novelist Marlon James won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.  The Anisfield-Wolf awards are “for literature that confronts racism and examines diversity.”

– With the publication of God Help the Child just a few days away, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiled Toni Morrison for the New York Times.  Read that article here, then listen to Morrison read an excerpt from her new novel here.