Archive - History of Black Writing Blog
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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 |
|---|---|
| Margaret Walker Centennial Celebration 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of Margaret Walker‘s birth. To celebrate the life of this remarkable author, Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center is sponsoring This is My Century: 100 Years of Margaret Walker, 1915-2015, a year of programming devoted to Walker’s work. .. | |
| Performance: Richard Wright in 2015 Despite my having “performed” Richard Wright with a modicum of success some years ago in a Chautauqua series sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council, I know virtually nothing about performance theory as an “interdisciplinary area of study and critical method,” as it is discussed in the recent book Black Performance Theory (2014), edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. For me, performing Wright was a matter of absorbing what I could of his personality and changing states of mind from his writings, listening to his recorded voice, and praying that on some spiritual level Wright would channel my imagination. I am not an actor, so I just gathered courage and, one magical night, I did become Richard Wright. At least, that was what several people in the audience told me. .. | |
| ICYMI: The Last 2 Weeks in Black Writing (3/13 – 3/26) – Stefanie Torres and Jennifer Colatosti recapped Kenton Rambsy’s Hall Center talk, “‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’: Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories.” .. | |
| Poetry and History: An Evening with U.S. Poet Laureate (2012-2014) Natasha Trethewey Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey spoke and read poems about art, family, and race as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities 2014-2015 Humanities Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 3. .. | |
| “Characteristics of Negro Expression”: Kenton Rambsy on the Importance of Digital Humanities in the Study of African American Short Stories On February 11, 2015, Hall Center Research Fellow and KU English Ph.D. candidate Kenton Rambsy presented on notable outcomes of his dissertation research in his interdisciplinary graduate research workshop, “Characteristics of Negro Expression: Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories,” at the University of Kansas. .. | |
| ICYMI: This Week in Black Writing (3/6-3/12) – Hoke Glover pondered poetry’s artistic segregation and the role of Black institutions. .. | |
| Genius and DAEMONIC GENIUS: Crafting a Biography of Richard Wright Crafting a biography of Richard Wright places special demands on a biographer. Wright was a genius, a man who embodied profound intelligence and creative vision, but Mississippi in the early twentieth century wasn’t the place for nurturing his kind of genius. .. | |
| Poet Notes #1 The world of poetry is like many of those integrated worlds that exist in America. There a careful balance is kept between the minority percentages and the hidden rules that govern the overall image of the enterprise. It is a neighborhood of sorts. If the amount of Blacks involved reaches 40 percent, there is a tipping point of sorts and some whites leave as they feel uncomfortable, and suddenly it becomes a Black neighborhood. .. | |
| ICYMI: The Last Two Weeks in Black Writing (2/20 – 3/5) – KU Ph.D. student Amanda M. Sladek considers Toussaint L’Ouverture and the problematic “slave narrative” genre for the HBW Emerging Scholars series. .. | |
| Sam Greenlee’s THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, Urban Revolts of the 1960s, and Beyond 50 years ago, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed. This also happens to be the year that Watts went up flames. .. |