Literary Criticism

Revised and updated edition of the groundbreaking book on Black women in comic artThe 2018 release of Marvel's blockbuster Black Panther film catapulted African American comics and animation into the limelight, with strong Black women characters at the...

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as "inaccessible," "irrelevant," or "intimidating." She argues that poetry is rooted in...

In Inhabitants of the Deep, Jonathan Howard undertakes a black ecocritical study of the deep in African American literature. Howard contends that the deep--a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth...

Historians and literary historians alike recognize David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830) as one of the most politically radical and consequential antislavery texts ever published, yet the pamphlet's significant impact on...

A collection of private correspondence from one of the Harlem Renaissance's brightest and most radical voices The Jamaican-born, queer author Claude McKay (1890-1948) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1919 poem "If We Must Die"...

In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in...

In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in...

José Felipe Alvergue examines anger in American poetry, while reflecting on the permissible/policed cultural affects of our time. By way of BIPOC and QTPOC poets engaging with negativity--frustration, anger, distress--Alvergue argues that affects that...

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "poem-life." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

New insights into the work of an acclaimed science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), a pioneer of science fiction and foremother of Afrofuturism, is among the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Her work blurs the boundaries...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self-aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn...