'Let Freedom Ring'
Art and Democracy in the King Years, 1954 – 1968
A Lannan Literary Symposium & Festival
Georgetown University
April 15, 16, 17, 2008
By sweeping away legal segregation in the public sphere, and especially by securing the right to participate in the democratic franchise for people of color, the Civil Rights Movement fundamentally changed American life. This struggle for social justice has been well documented and justly honored. Less well-documented is how the arts helped sustain the Movement and were essential to its successes. On the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, the Lannan Literary Symposium seeks to acknowledge this legacy while paying special attention to the contributions of poets, writers, and artists to the public discourse of the Movement, especially during the period Taylor Branch has called "the King Years," 1954-1968.
Readings, performances, lectures, and discussions will take place on April 15, 16, & 17 at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.
Free and open to the public
Click for event schedule
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SPONSORS
Lannan Foundation | Office of the University President | Program in African American Studies |
Office of the College Dean | Department of English | Department of History |
Lacay Lecture Fund | Diversity Action Council | Georgetown University Americas Initiative
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Mark McMorris, mcmorrim@georgetown.edu, director of Lannan Literary Programs;
Angelyn Mitchell, alm22@georgetown.edu, director of the 2008 Lannan Symposium.
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Schedule
TUESDAY, APRIL 15
5:00 – 6:00 PM
WELCOME AND PLENARY LECTURE (Copley)
"'Woke Up This Morning': the Creativity of the Freedom Songs." Vincent Harding explores the artistry of the songs used to inspire and to sustain participants in the Civil Rights Movement while also serving to narrate the Movement’s goals.
6:00 – 7:00 PM
OPENING RECEPTION (Copley)
8:00 – 9:30 PM
POETRY READING (ICC)
Identity: A reading by Amiri Baraka, Eugene Redmond, and Haki Madhubuti.
9:30 – 10:00 PM
RECEPTION AND BOOKSIGNING (ICC)
10:00 – 11:00 PM
OPEN MIC (Bulldog Alley)
"We Who Believe in Freedom"
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16
9:30 – 11:45 AM
SYMPOSIUM I: Art and Democracy in the King Years and Beyond: Scholarly Assessments (Copley)
Scholars assess the artistic production of the years of the Civil Rights Movement. What is the role of the arts in times of social and political upheaval? Joanne Gabbin, Aldon Nielson, Sandra Shannon, Valerie Smith, Eleanor Traylor, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and Jabari Asim (moderator).
1:00 – 3:15 PM
SYMPOSIUM II: Creativity, Resistance, Liberation: Forms of Political Engagement in the Arts of the 1960s (Copley)
Advancing resistance and liberation through the arts—especially drama and poetry. Is all art propaganda, as DuBois held? With the writers Sonia Sanchez, E. Ethelbert Miller, Amiri Baraka, Barbara Teer, Haki Madhubuti, and Soyica Diggs (moderator).
3:45 – 5:00 PM
2008 LACAY PLENARY LECTURE (Gonda)
"Art as a Form of Politics." Amiri Baraka considers the ways in which artists are political, and how politics is used in art.
5:15 – 6:00 PM
RECEPTION (Old North 205)
8:00 – 10:00 PM
POETRY READING (Old North 205)
Ethics: a reading by Sonia Sanchez, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Askia Touré.
10:00 – 10:30 PM
RECEPTION & BOOKSIGNING (Old North 205)
10:00 – 11:00 PM
OPEN MIC (Bulldog Alley)
"I Have a Dream"
THURSDAY, APRIL 17
9:30 – 12:00 PM
SYMPOSIUM III: Living History: Activists on Art and Social Justice (Copley)
Political activists discuss their personal engagement with poetry, plays, songs, and narrative during the Civil Rights Movement. Lawrence Guyot, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Charles Cobb, Walter Fauntroy, Dorie Ladner, Ruth Harris and Maurice Jackson (moderator).
12:15 – 1:45 PM
LUNCHEON AND PLENARY LECTURE (Copley)
"Music of Struggle." Ruth Harris reflects on the activism of community-building through song.
2:15 – 4:30 PM
SYMPOSIUM IV: Advancing American Ideals: Democracy as a Goal for the Arts (Copley)
Writers consider how American ideals—such as freedom, citizenship, & democracy—have informed artistic production and reception. Randall Kenan, Askia Touré, Thulani Davis, Eugene Redmond, Jayne Cortez and Robert Patterson (moderator).
5:00 – 6:15 PM
PLENARY LECTURE (Copley)
"'A Change Is Gonna Come'? Art and the Politics of the Black Possible." Michael Eric Dyson on art's generative capacities.
8:00 – 10:00 PM
POETRY & FICTION READING (ICC)
Community: a reading by Randall Kenan, Thulani Davis, Barbara Teer, and Jayne Cortez.
10:00 – 10:30 PM
RECEPTION AND BOOKSIGNING (ICC)
10:00 – 11:00 PM
OPEN MIC (Bulldog Alley)
"Make Some Noise"
The InterCultural Center Auditorium (ICC), Copley Formal Lounge (Copley), Gonda Theatre, Old North 205, and Bulldog Alley are located on Georgetown's main campus, 37th and O Street, NW. All events at Georgetown are free and open to the public.
BIOS
Compiled by Alexis Chema
Jabari Asim is an author, journalist, poet, and playwright born in St. Louis, Missouri. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Crisis, the NAACP’s flagship publication. Previously, he was deputy editor at the Washington Post Book World, a post he held for nearly a decade. His most recent book is The N Word: Who Can Say it, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (2007), which The Los Angeles Times calls “a sharp-eyed musing on the history of the word and how it bears, or should bear, on a media-driven culture that is dangerously ahistorical, especially in matters of race.” Asim also edited the collection of essays, Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out on Law, Justice, and Life (2002). His writing has appeared in Essence, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, The International Herald Tribune, Emerge, and many other publications, and his poems, essays, and plays have been anthologized widely in collections including Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature (2000), The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literature (2000), and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century (2002), edited by E. Ethelbert Miller. Called “perhaps the most influential African-American literary critic of his generation” by The Washington Post, Asim has also written for local theater companies and is author of several books for children and young adults. Asim lives in Maryland with his wife and five children.
Amiri Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, and is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism. His work includes the study on African-American music, Blues People (1963); the play Dutchman (1963); Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979); The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987), a collaboration with his wife, poet Amina Baraka; a collection of essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003); and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Out & the Gone (2006). Gwendolyn Brooks said “His works works—in terms of efficiency, in terms of amazing manipulation of fire and music. Baraka is always news.” His many awards and honors include an Obie Award, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, and Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Buffalo, Columbia University, San Francisco State University, Yale University, and George Washington University. He is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a former Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Baraka lives in Newark with his wife; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement.
Charles Cobb, Jr., is an author, poet, and journalist born in Washington, D.C. A field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967, Cobb originated the "Freedom School" proposal that became a crucial part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Cobb's first volume of poetry, In the Furrows of the World (1967), illustrated with his own photographs, grew out of his civil rights work and his 1967 visit to Vietnam. He published another volume of poetry, Everywhere Is Yours, in 1971. Cobb's more recent work as an essayist and journalist has reflected his interest in social, environmental, and political issues. He is a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists and has reported for WHUR Radio in Washington, D.C., National Public Radio, PBS's Frontline, and National Geographic. His most recent book is On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (2008), a historical guide book to the people, places, and events, especially the lesser-known and grassroots, of the Civil Rights Movement. The Library Journal writes: “His historical perspective is vast, utilizing early American slave revolts and the retrenchment of racist policies following the end of Reconstruction as departure points for the later freedom struggle and drawing on interviews and incredible pictures to show us the trail through haunting imagery.” Cobb co-edited No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000 (2007), and co-wrote, with Robert Moses, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (2001). He is a senior correspondent for the online news and information agency allAfrica.com, in Washington, D.C.
Jayne Cortez was born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and grew up in California. She is the author of ten books of poems and has released nine recordings of her poetry with music. Cortez has presented her work and ideas at universities, museums, and festivals in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. She is the recipient of various awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the International African Festival Award, The Langston Hughes Award, and the American Book Award. Her books of poetry include The Beautiful Book (2007), Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002), and Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996). According to Maya Angelou, “Cortez has been and continues to be an explorer, probing the valleys and chasms of human existence. No ravine is too perilous, no abyss too threatening for Jayne Cortez.” Her latest CD recordings with her band, The Firespitters, are Find Your Own Voice (2007), Borders of Disorderly Time (2003), and Taking the Blues Back Home (1997). Cortez is organizer of the conferences “Slave Routes the Long Memory” and “Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writer Dissecting Globalization,” both held at New York University. She is president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc. and is featured in the films Women in Jazz and Poetry in Motion. She currently lives in New York City.
Thulani Davis is a writer and an interdisciplinary artist who creates text in a wide range of forms. Davis grew up in the 1950s in Virginia, where her parents taught at Hampton University. She was educated at Barnard College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. In college, she was "schooled" for her first spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the original Last Poets, and considers them among the many poets of her artistic lineage—a list including Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and many before them. Over the course of Davis’s long and diverse artistic career, she has worked as a performance poet and artist, documentarian, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She is the author of My Confederate Kinfolk (2006), Maker of Saints (1996), which won an American Book Award, Malcolm X: The Great Photographs (1993), 1959 (1992), a novel and nominee for an Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and others. Davis is also the librettist for the operas Amistad (1997) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986), which, according to The New Yorker “has brought new life to America's conservative operatic scene, being a work at once genuinely new, musically and theatrically effective, and concerned with matter that, still inflammatory years after Malcolm X's assassination, is kept before us each day in New York's streets....The work is gripping, and it is unlike any other opera.” She has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter and an editor for the Village Voice, and co-founded, with Joseph Jarman, the Brooklyn Buddhist Association. At present, she is teaching playwriting part-time at NYU and starting another book.
Soyica Diggs received her B.A. in English from Georgetown University and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and now teaches in the English Department of Dartmouth University. Her interests are African America drama, literature, performance, and culture, and women's and gender studies. Her research has been supported by a Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Dissertation and Summer Research Fellowships, and a Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship. Diggs has contributed Casebook on Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (2007), Sonic Interventions (2007), and North American Women’s Drama Collection (2004). Her current book project, From Repetition to Reproduction: African American Performance, Drama, and History, argues that African American drama presents strategies to interpret historical evidence embedded in black performance.
Ivanhoe Donaldson was an active member of the SNCC and is now a businessman and political consultant. Donaldson worked for SNCC as an organizer and held leadership positions within the organization. In 1960-62, as a SNCC field secretary, Donaldson collected food in Michigan and Kentucky and brought it to Mississippi to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers who had been kicked off of their land for attempting to register to vote. In 1963 he was active in demonstrations in Danville, Virginia, and later during "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi in 1964. After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began planning a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, Donaldson became one of the SNCC organizers in Selma. In 1968, Donaldson helped found Afro-American Resources, Inc., which ran the Drum and Spear Bookstore, Drum and Spear Press, and the Center for Black Education in Washington, D.C. He was also a visiting lecturer for Afro-American courses at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. Donaldson advised and worked for Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry for many years. Donaldson is currently a vice-president for labor force management company PRWT Services. He continues to support SNCC related activities and served on the advisory committee for an October 2005 conference called “Tell the Story: The Chicago SNCC History Project, 1960 -1965.”
Michael Eric Dyson is a renowned scholar, ordained Baptist minister, and public intellectual born in Detroit, Michigan. His innovative scholarship, combining cultural criticism and biography, focuses on race, religion, popular culture, and contemporary issues in the African American community. Dyson's most recent book is April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America (2008). He is also the author of Know What I Mean? (2007), a critical study of hip hop music, Debating Race (2007), a compilation of previously unpublished conversations with scholars, politicians and public commentators, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006), Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind (2006), Why I Love Black Women (2004), The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (2004), Open Mike (2002), I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001), and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1997). “Effortlessly and with conviction, [Dyson] weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience,” Noam Chomsky has said of Dyson. A two-time winner of the NAACP Image Award, Dyson has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, DePaul University, Chicago Theological Seminary, The University of North Carolina, and Columbia and Brown Universities. He is currently University Professor at Georgetown University.
Walter E. Fauntroy was born in Washington, D.C. After attending Yale University Divinity School he became the pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington. In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. appointed Fauntroy director of the Washington Bureau of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and he served as Dr. King’s personal representative to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1966 President Johnson appointed Fauntroy vice chairman of the White House's "To Fulfill These Rights" conference. He has also served as vice chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia and national coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign. Fauntroy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1971, making him the first delegate to serve the District of Columbia in 100 years, and served until he retired from Congress in 1990. Fauntroy was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which he chaired in 1981, and author of the “Black Leadership Family Plan For the Unity, Survival and Progress of Black People” (1982). On Thanksgiving Eve in 1984 he, with Randall Robinson and Dr. Mary Francis Berry, launched the Free South Africa Movement with their arrest at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. Fauntroy is president of the National Black Leadership Roundtable, the national network vehicle of the Congressional Black Caucus that he founded in 1977. In that capacity, he is co-chair of the Sudan Campaign and chairman of the Business Enterprise Development, LLC. He is married, has two children, and lives in Washington, D.C.
Joanne Gabbin was educated at Morgan State University and the University of Chicago. In 1994 Gabbin organized and directed the historic conference, “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry,” which she called the “largest gathering of poets, critics, and scholars in more than two decades” dedicated to celebrating the African American poetic tradition. In 2004, Gabbin organized the second Furious Flower poetry conference. She is editor of Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004) and The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), and executive producer of the Furious Flower video and DVD series. She is also author of a biography, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1994), and a children’s book, I Bet She Called Me Sugarplum (2004). Gabbin’s articles have appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, The Zora Neale Hurston Forum, The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing, the Langston Hughes Journal, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and others. In October 2005, Gabbin was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. She is founder and organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective, and owner of the 150 Franklin Street Gallery in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She is currently a professor of English at James Madison University where she is also director of the Honors Program and executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.
Lawrence Guyot was born in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Guyot earned his B.S. degree in Biology and Philosophy from Tugaloo College and his law degree from Rutgers University. While at Tugaloo, he became active in civil rights and was one of the original members of the SNCC. In 1964, Guyot directed the Freedom Summer Project in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. That same year, he was elected chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a post he held when the MFDP challenged the state party's refusal to allow African Americans in its delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964. The challenge led Mississippi party officials to integrate and to include women in its delegation. In 1966, Guyot ran for Congress as an anti-war candidate. A resident of Washington, D.C. since 1971, Guyot has remained active in local politics and civil rights issues. He is an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for LeDroit Park and conducts leadership trainings for a number of organizations including Operation Understanding, the University of Mississippi, Georgetown University, and Americorps. He makes frequent appearances on national and local news programs and has been featured in several documentaries, including “Eyes on the Prize,” PBS’s acclaimed documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement, as well as Making Sense of the Sixties, The War on Poverty, and Tales of the FBI.
Vincent Harding is an author, historian, and activist who was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem and the Bronx. After graduating from the City College of New York, he earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. Harding spent two years in the army, after which he lived in Chicago for six years, serving as lay minister in churches on Chicago's south side and pursuing a doctorate at the University of Chicago. In the 1960s Harding was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, assisting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality throughout the South. Harding went on to teach at Spelman College, Pendle Hill Study Center, University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. He was the first director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and served as director and chairperson of The Institute of the Black World. Among Harding’s publications are Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996), Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (1990), There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981), and The Other American Revolution (1980). He was also senior academic consultant to the award-winning PBS television series, “Eyes on the Prize.” Harding is professor emeritus of Religion and Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology, and is the co-founder and chair of the Veterans of Hope Project, an interdisciplinary initiative on religion, culture, and grassroots democracy.
Ruth Harris is a musician, educator, and civil rights activist from Albany, Georgia. As a member of the SNCC, Harris participated in voter registration drives and picket lines, demonstrated, and was jailed three times. In 1962 she co-founded the SNCC Freedom Singers with Charles Neblett, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Cordell Reagon. The a cappella group toured the country many times singing old spirituals and new “freedom songs” based on the tradition of African American choral music. The Freedom Singers helped raise money for the SNCC and spread awareness of the civil rights movement to new audiences through their concerts. Harris and the Freedom Singers traveled 50,000 miles through 40 states in nine months, during which time they performed on college and university campuses, jails, marches, political meetings and rallies, and at the March on Washington in 1963. They also performed alongside folk singers Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. The same year, The New York Times called the Freedom Singers “the ablest performing group” out of a wide field of folk musicians. The music of Harris and the Freedom Singers has been released on albums including Newport Broadside (1963) and Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights through its Songs (1990). In 1995 Harris founded a new group of Freedom Singers, the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum Freedom Singers, who continue to tour and perform once a month at the museum. Harris also teaches at Monroe Comprehensive High School in Albany, GA.
Maurice Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Raised in Newport News, Virginia, and the Piney Woods of Alabama, Jackson came to Georgetown after spending many years active in the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1970s Jackson worked in the national legislative office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. Since then, he has been involved in community affairs, serving as a delegate to the D.C. Constitutional Convention and an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner. Jackson has played leading roles in the anti-war movements, the fight for undocumented workers and the homeless, and for jobs, education, and equality. His manuscript, Anthony Benezet: Founding Father of Atlantic Emancipation, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2008. The work is an intellectual and social history of the transatlantic fight against slavery triggered by the French-born Huguenot, Anthony Benezet. Other forthcoming works include his article “‘Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The path is open to the sea’: Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music and Culture of the African American People,” which will appear in Early American Studies (2008), and the chapter “The Rise of Abolition,” which will appear in The Atlantic World, 1450-2000 (2008). Jackson will soon begin work on two new projects. The first is Race over Reason: The Social, Intellectual and Political Foundations of America’s Abandonment of its Black Brethren in the Aftermath of the Revolutionary War. The second is a social and cultural history of African Americans in Washington, D.C.
Randall Kenan is an acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction born in Brooklyn, New York. After he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kenan worked for several years on the editorial staff of the publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. His first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989. His collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1993 and hailed by The New York Times as “nothing short of a wonder-book: one of those striking literary anomalies, in the tradition of “Raintree County” and “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” that are nearly as difficult to classify as they are enjoyable to read and reread.” That collection was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. Kenan is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Other publications include Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2000) and The Fire this Time (2007), a work of nonfiction. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Duke University, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and Vassar College. His many awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the Rome Prize. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005. He is currently a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dorie Ladner is a civil rights activist born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She first became involved with the Civil Rights Movement when she and her sister and fellow activist, Joyce Ladner, joined the Hattiesburg NAACP Youth Council in 1958. Mentored by civil rights leaders Vernon Dahmer and Clyde Kennard, Ladner went on to work as a field secretary for the SNCC, recruiting, organizing, and canvassing votes in towns in the Mississippi Delta. Before graduating from Tougaloo College, Ladner dropped out of school three times to work full-time for the SNCC, working in various capacities. She spent time fundraising from the New York SNCC office, and as a project director in Natchez, Mississippi. She and Joyce Ladner also worked for a time in Jackson, Mississippi, where they lived in the legendary Freedom House with other activists, including Bob Moses and Lawrence Guyot. She marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery and at the March on Washington in 1963. Ladner remained in the SNCC until 1966 when she moved to St. Louis where she worked for an anti-poverty program and continued her activism with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Ladner moved to Washington, D.C. in 1974 to pursue a graduate degree at Howard University's School of Social Work. Until her recent retirement, Ladner worked as a social worker in the emergency room of D.C. General Hospital. She has continued her activist work as an advocate for voter rights and affirmative action. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Haki Madhubuti was born Donald Luther Lee in Little Rock, Arkansas. A poet, essayist, editor, and publisher, Madhubuti was one of the early prominent voices in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. After serving in the US Army, he attended Chicago City College and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He is the author of more than twenty books including YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life (2006), which Vibe Magazine writes “conjures up the sound of Miles Davis, the acuity of Richard Wright, the intellect of W.E.B. Dubois, and the grittiness of street culture: a soundtrack to the lives of urban youth across America.” His collections of poetry include Run Toward Fear: New Poems and a Poet's Handbook (2004), HeartLove: Wedding & Love Poems (1998), Groundwork: New and Selected Poems of Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti (1996), Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973- 1983 (1984), and Directionscore: Selected and New Poems (1971). His prose works include Tough Notes: A Healing Call for Creating Exceptional Black Men (2002), Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption (1995), and Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (1991). He is the co-editor, with Maulana Karenga, of Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology (1996). Madhubuti is the founder and publisher of Third World Press. He is also a co-founder of the Institute of Positive Education in Chicago. Among his honors and awards are an American Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently the University Distinguished Professor and professor of English, founder and director emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center and the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Chicago State University.
Mark McMorris was born in Kingston, Jamaica and educated at Columbia University and Brown University. A two-time winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series award from the University of Georgia Press, McMorris is the author of four books of poetry: The Café at Light (2004), The Blaze of the Poui (2003), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2004, The Black Reeds (1997), and Moth-Wings (1996). McMorris’s collections have been praised by Charles Bernstein for their “intense, articulate, and splendid lyricism crashing against an historical and social imagination that never quite wants to be epic – that distrusts the grandiosity of epic – but which wants to gesture toward the epic.” His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Conjunctions, Callaloo, Hambone, New American Writing, and An Anthology of New (American) Poets. Recently, he was writer in residence at Brown University, and in 2005 was Roberta C. Holloway Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of English at Georgetown University, where he serves as director of Georgetown’s Lannan Literary Programs. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his family.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and poet born in New York City. Miller is the author of several collections of poems and “arguably the most influential person in Washington's vast and vibrant African American arts community,” according to The Washington Post. His latest book, How We Sleep On The Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004), was an Independent Publisher Award Finalist, and his other awards and honors include the Columbia Merit Award, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, and the 2007 Barnes & Noble/ Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets & Writers. Educated at Howard University, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Emory & Henry College in 1996. In 2003 his memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000), was selected by the DC We Read for its One Book, One City program sponsored by the D.C. Public Libraries, and in 2004, Miller was awarded a Fulbright to visit Israel. Miller is the former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. and a former core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Since 1974, he has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. He is a board member of The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine, and is often heard on National Public Radio. Miller lives with his family in Washington, D.C.
Angelyn Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University and the director of the 2008 Lannan Literary Symposium & Festival. A native of North Carolina, Mitchell earned her Ph.D. from Howard University, her M.A. from North Carolina Central University, and B.A. from North Carolina State University. Mitchell's teaching and research interests are: American and African American literary and cultural studies, critical theory, critical race studies, and women's studies. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Reading Toni Morrison, Slavery and the American Literary Imagination, Reading Race in American Literature, and Twentieth-Century Black Women Writers. Mitchell's selected publications include articles on William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison, Arthur P. Davis, and Octavia Butler. She is the editor of Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1994). She is also the author of The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, & Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction (2002), and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Writing. Mitchell has been involved with a number of initiatives concerning diversity at Georgetown. In 2004 she co-chaired the University's commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education. Mitchell is the founding director of the African American Studies Program at Georgetown, where she also directs the Minority Mentoring Program. Georgetown’s Black Student Alliance has recognized Mitchell with two Outstanding Faculty Awards. Her current research project is entitled “The Essential American: Toni Morrison, Identity, and Race.”
Aldon Nielsen is a poet and critic born in Grand Island, Nebraska. Educated in Washington, D.C. at Federal City College and George Washington University, Nielsen has taught at Howard University, San Jose State University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Loyola Marymount University. He has published five collections of poetry, Mixage (2006), Vext (1998), Stepping Razor (1996), Evacuation Routes (1992), and Heat Strings (1985). He was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, and has received two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovative poetry. His first volume of literary criticism, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (1988), won the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Myers Citation and the Kayden Award for best book in the humanities. Subsequent works of scholarship include Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality (1994), C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (1997), Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (1997), and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (2004). Most recently Nielson co-edited, with Lauri Ramey, Every Goodbye Ain' t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African American Artists (2006). Nielsen is the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature in the Pennsylvania State University 's Department of English. He divides his time between Pennsylvania and California.
Robert Patterson received his B.A. in English from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. He teaches in the English Department at Florida State University, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural studies. His primary research analyzes the ways in which the biblical notion of Chosenness has been a defining yet under-theorized aspect of African American literary and cultural studies. Patterson is the recipient of a Ford Pre-doctoral Fellowship and has contributed to The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Teaching and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Writing (forthcoming). He currently is working on his first book project, tentatively titled Are Many Called, But Few Chosen? Contemporary African American Literature and a New Direction for Political Enfranchisement, which examines African American literature's preoccupation with African Americans' quests for civil rights, and the attendant notion of God-sent (Chosen) figures who lead civil rights movements. In addition to literary studies, Patterson's research and teaching interests include the fields of African American, American, Cultural, and Gender Studies, as well as Liberation and Womanist Theologies.
Eugene Redmond was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a poet, playwright, critic, editor, educator, and important figure in the Black Arts Movement. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University and Washington University, St. Louis. In 1968 he published his first volume of poetry, A Tale of Two Toms, or Tom-Tom. Subsequent volumes include A Tale of Time & Toilet Tissue (1969), Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), River of Bones and Flesh and Blood (1971), Songs from an Afro/Phone (1972), Consider Loneliness as These Things (1973), In a Time of Rain & Desire (1973), and The Eye in the Ceiling (1992). Three of these collections were published by the Black Writers Press, which Redmond founded with Henry Dumas and Sherman Fowler. He is also author of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, a Critical History (1976), an influential survey of poetry from 1746 to 1976. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Pan-African Movement USA, a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, and Writing Fellowships from the California, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri and West Virginia Arts Councils. He has been poet in residence at Oberlin College, California State University, University of Wisconsin, and Wayne State University. Since 1990 Redmond has taught at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where he is currently an emeritus professor of English and editor of Drumvoices Revue. He lives in East St. Louis, MO.
Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College and did postgraduate work at New York University. An important figure in the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, and Larry Neal. She was a member of the “Broadside Quartet” with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight. During her early years as an educator she taught at San Francisco State University, where she helped found the first Black Studies program. Her collections of poetry include Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (2000); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does Your House Have Lions? (1998), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award; Love Poems (1973); We a BaddDDD People (1970); and Homecoming (1969). “Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty,” Isabel Allende said of Sanchez’s poetry. Sanchez has published plays, written books for children, edited several anthologies, and released a solo spoken-word album with music, Full Moon of Sonia (2004). Among her many honors are the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadelphia.
Sandra Shannon is a professor of English at Howard University. One of the leading authorities on the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, Shannon is the author of The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (1996), the first book-length study of his work. African American Review writes that “Shannon’s journalistic, on-the-pulse approach…adds immediacy and an element of orality, making the reader feel that he or she is in the actual presence of the playwright’s voice, privy to his inflections and personal phrasings.” In 2003 she published August Wilson's Fences: A Reference Guide, a companion piece to Wilson's acclaimed play, Fences. She also co-edited the collection August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (2004). Shannon's work has been published in the African American Review, Theatre Review, Callaloo, Obsidian II, the Zora Neale Hurston Review, and MELUS. She has contributed essays to African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (2001), Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures (1996), May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994), and others. Shannon is currently editing Approaches to Teaching August Wilson (forthcoming in 2008), and is co-editor of Theatre Topics Journal. She is also president of the Black Theatre Network. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Shannon lives in Maryland.
Valerie Smith was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Bates College and the University of Virginia. Smith has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Princeton University. She is also the director of Princeton’s Center for African American Studies. She is a specialist in African American literature and culture, with specific interests in black feminist theory and film studies. Her publications include Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (1998) and Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987). She has also edited Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (1997), New Essays on Song of Solomon (1994), and African American Writers (1991). She co-edited a special issue of Black American Literature Forum (now African American Review) on black film with Camille Billops and Ada Gay Griffin, and a special issue of Signs with Marianne Hirsch on gender and cultural memory. She has held fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-06 and an Alphonse G. Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship in 2006-07. At present, she is completing a book on the Civil Rights Movement in cultural memory.
Barbara Ann Teer was born in East St. Louis, Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois, Teer moved to New York City to begin her career as an actress, dancer, and director. Teer left her successful career as a Broadway actress in the 1960s to begin teaching in Harlem’s Wadleigh Junior High School. Continuing her work as an educator, Teer helped develop the Group Theatre Workshop. In 1968, she founded the National Black Theatre (NBT) with the goal of maintaining and perpetuating African American cultural traditions, developing a new black theory of acting, and creating economic empowerment through the arts. An historic institute for African-American dramatic arts, NBT was the country's first revenue-generating black theater arts complex. Wole Soyinka, the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, said, “Barbara Ann Teer…is a fervent researcher into the communication roots of African societies and their classic performance modes.” Teer has toured with the National Black Theatre to Haiti, Bermuda, Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa, Nigeria, and throughout the United States. She is currently the CEO of the National Black Theatre, which continues to offer classes, lectures, workshops and symposia, and to host musical and dramatic performances.
Ekwueme Michael Thelwell is a writer, activist, and educator, born in Ulster Spring, Jamaica. After graduating from Jamaica College, he worked as a public relations assistant for Jamaica Industrial Development Corporation. He moved to the United States in 1959. He received a BA from Howard University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Thelwell was a field secretary with SNCC, and he recruited volunteers for Freedom Summer from Washington in 1963. He also worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, running its congressional challenge campaign. He participated in anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s. He is the author of two screenplays and has published stories and articles in Black Scholar, Negro Digest, The New York Times, and others. He also published the collection of essays Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts (1987), and the novel The Harder They Come (1980), which Chinua Achebe called "a magnificent achievement – moving, eloquent, defiant…. A major milestone in the cultural history of black people." His most recent work is the political autobiography of Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (2003), which he co-wrote. He has published and lectured widely on James Baldwin. Thelwell's literary awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Society for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Centennial Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Since 1969, he has taught in the Afro-American Studies department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he served as founding chairman, and is currently Professor of Literature and Writing.
Askia Touré was born Rolland Snellings in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a poet, community activist, lecturer, educator, and one of the pioneers of the Black Arts Movement. As a member of the SNCC, Touré participated in the Atlanta Project and co-authored the SNCC’s “Black Power Position Paper.” During the 1960s he was also a contributing editor for the magazine Black Dialogue, an editor-at-large for the Journal of Black Poetry, and a staff writer of Liberator Magazine and Soulbook. As an educator, Touré taught African history in San Francisco State University’s pioneering Africana Studies program. His volumes of verse include African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots (2007), Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Touré (1999), which was awarded the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award, From the Pyramid to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance (1989), a collection of poems for which he won the American Book Award, Songhai! (1972), and Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (1970). His poems have been anthologized in Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004) and From Totems to Hip Hop: A Multi-Cultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 (2002). In 1996, Touré was awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement Award. Touré has lived in Boston since 1997, where he is a member of the African-American Master Artists-in-Residence Program at Northeastern University. He is working on an independent film based on his play, “Double Dutch: A Gathering of Women,” as well as a libretto based on his poem, “From the Pyramids to the Projects, From the Projects to the Stars.”
Eleanor W. Traylor, Graduate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Howard University, is a scholar and critic in African-American literature and criticism. Traylor is a graduate of Spelman College, Atlanta University, and Catholic University. She later received a Merrill Scholarship to the Stuttgarter Hochschule in West Germany and a research fellowship to study at the Institute of African Studies in Ghana and Nigeria. Her work has appeared in the form of chapter essays, biographies, articles, and papers on such writers as Larry Neal, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright. She is the author of Broad Sympathy: The Howard University Oral Traditions Reader (1996), The Humanities and Afro-American Literary Tradition (1988), a multimedia piece entitled “The Dream Awake: A Spoken Arts Production” (1968), College Reading Skills (1966), and biographical and cultural scripts for the Smithsonian Institution's Program in Black American Culture. Traylor has taught at Georgetown University, Tougaloo College, Cornell University, and others, and was the department chair for the U.S. Department of Agriculture English program. She has also held advisory roles with the D.C. Repertory Theater Company, the Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Black Arts Festival, and Educators for the Advancement of African-American Literature in the (Public) Schools, which Traylor established. She is currently working on a book on the pedagogy of African-American literature.
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