Archive - History of Black Writing Blog
The Banner image for the HBW Blog, which was published from 2011-2021.
Black Literary History Making
The HBW Blog published regularly for ten years from 2011-2021 at the URL https://projecthbw.ku.edu. During that time, it served as a major forum for the exchange of information and ideas, as well as a robust network for scholars, teachers, and students from different disciplines around the world.
Guest contributors include leading scholars and writers, but most of the posts were conceived of, researched, and written by HBW's staff of undergraduate and graduate students. Its content consists of feature editorials, book reviews, memorials, and coverage of HBW programming. Altogether, 95 writers contributed more than 750 posts.
The HBW Blog Archive is searchable by topic, month and year, and contributor name.
| Blog Post/Link | Date |
|---|---|
| Day 3: An Ode to #BlackExcellence Margaret Walker published her only novel Jubilee in 1966. Based on the story of her great-grandmother, the novel ushered in the era of neo-slave narratives. Though she published twelve books during her lifetime, her major legacy is the Institute for the Study of History, Life and Culture of Black People which she founded in 1986, and was later renamed the Margaret Walker Center in her honor. .. | |
| Day 2: An Ode to #BlackExcellence Today we celebrate Toni Cade Bambara, writer of Black women’s literature, editor, and documentary film maker for her contributions to the Black womanist tradition, both through her own writing and as a pioneer of editing and publishing Black feminist anthologies. .. | |
| Black History Month + Black Futures Month We are proud to celebrate Black History Month in conjunction with Black Futures Month at HBW. Each day we will feature works from our archives that celebrate the glory that is #BlackExcellence and the Black freedom movement. .. | |
| Podcast Alert: "Dr. King and Donald Trump's America” As we celebrate #MLKDay2018 take a moment to listen to the latest from our good friend Kevin Powell... | |
| GUEST BLOG: THE ELEGANCE OF GRACE In her 2007 poem “In Search of Grace,” Quo Vadis Gex Breaux makes an elegant plea for an enabling virtue. .. | |
| #FBF: "Bree Newsome Visits KU" As the tension of the 2015 Charleston church shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal thickened the air, Bree Newsome climbed into the sky to tear down hatred’s flag... | |
| EVENTS: Midwest Poets Series EVENTS: Midwest Poets Series .. | |
| Publishing Without Walls The Jay Z Mixtape, created by Kenton Ramsby, is a Scalar open access book published through the African American Studies PWW series housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This innovative digital humanities publication offers a brief glimpse into the creative output of the Brooklyn rapper by organizing online content into a single composition. From Tableau Public visualizations to an assortment of YouTube videos, this publication reveals the interconnectivity of Jay Z artistry across 12 solo albums through three broad categories: Language, Collaborations, and Musical Samples... | |
| HYPE In his foreword for Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), Nicholas Rich asserts that Didion’s prose has “cool majesty” as well as “an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain” (xi). The assertion and the subject of the assertion invite scrutiny. Truth be told, the sentence “Everyone in the place seemed to have been there a long time, and to know everyone else.” (29) is neither immaculate nor intimidating. .. | |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God at 80: The Season for Black Love In one of the most memorable scenes in Zora Neale Hurston’s now-classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Granny asks Janie, the child she is about to send off to marry, “Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.” The quote is a mere 20 pages into the novel after Janie has begun to recount her life adventures to her best friend, Pheoby Watson. From that point on, we know this is a novel about growth and about love… Black love. .. |