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 |
|---|---|
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (6/10-6/16) W. Camau Bell spoke on reading about Muhammad Ali in order to come to terms with his own blackness, as well as ending racism... | |
| What Makes Me Sad: Brief Comments on Prince After thedeath of my father, I’m starting to realize that my family may have a slightlydifferent notion about death. In Kalamuya Salaam’s unreleased manuscript about Robert Johnson, he states of the Delta that birth and death comingle like night and day, one needing the other for its completion. .. | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (6/4-6/10) KU professor John Edgar Tidwell spoke about Langston Hughes’s unpublished story, “Seven People Dancing”: “This is a very interesting piece because it provides us new information to ponder as we seek to interrogate Hughes’ complexity in the early 1960s….. | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (5/28-6/3) Tamara Best of the New York Times wrote on the social advocacy of writer Ralph Ellison and photographer Gordon Parks, both of whom used their talents to address racial injustice... | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (5/21-5/27) “On the first novel published by a Black Caribbean Writer in England” – Minty Alley by Cyril Lionel Robert James. The novel was among the first to focus on social class, realism, and race in Caribbean literature... | |
| Medgar Evers International Writer’s Conference, Report 2 of 2 I was not sure what to expect as I entered the auditorium for the fourth time Saturday for the panel, Creating Dangerously: Courage and Resistance in the literature of Black Writers: A Conversation. The conversation was moderated by Victoria Chevalier and featured novelist and short story writer, Edwidge Danticat, and scholar and author, Charles Johnson as panelist. Many of the previous conversations seemed to be coming from a far away place mentally, chronologically, and generationally. .. | |
| Music/Painting/Poetry: Outroducing Expectations Gross, Lean, and Moore based their satiric project on two primary beliefs: (1) combining painting, poetry, and music can produce “a work that would be more imaginative than any of the single disciplines could create alone” and (2) Aristotle was correct in proposing “the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.”.. | |
| ICYMI: The Last Week in Black Writing and Culture (5/14-5/20) Levelle Porter, assistant professor at CUNY, wrote on the politics of Audre Lorde: “It is not our differences that divide us, it is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”.. | |
| Medgar Evers International Writer’s Conference, Report 1 of 2 Provocateurs: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Photographers and Writers exhibit:.. | |
| Callaloo #1 to #7 This year I will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Callaloo, based on the fact that the date on the first issue was December 1976. On the other hand, Charles H. Rowell’s “Editor’s Note” in Issue #2 (February , 1978) indicates “CALLALOO first appeared in January, 1977….”(3). .. |