Literary Criticism

Honorable Mention, 2024 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to...

Three groundbreaking texts on Black rhetoric by a renowned and award-winning scholar. Explore the influential prose of Keith Gilyard in this impressive collection, bringing together three seminal works that challenge and expand our understanding of...

The first collection of essays published on trailblazing nineteenth-century Black feminist, activist, journal, and educator, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was a trailblazing Black feminist, activist, journalist, and educator whose...

This work examines African American children's poetry through a variety of lenses: jazz poetics, the blues, nonsense verse, gender and working-class studies. African American children's poetry reveals legacies of segregation, the Great Migration north,...

Investigating why Hurston's writing fell out of favor during her lifetime only to be appreciated years after her death"Genevieve West's impressive new study clearly documents the course of Zora Neale Hurston's remarkable literary career and her...

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings. Winner of the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book,...

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a...

In Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (cuny) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period,...

"James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. . . . He was a giant." -- Maya Angelou This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year...

A monumental collection by one of America's greatest authors of children's literature -- and the launch of a new imprint, ReLIT, that republishes lost classics for a modern readership! Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) was not only one of the most...

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time. Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of...

This long-awaited and much-needed volume shines new light on one of America's most beloved, and profound, poets--Lucille Clifton.Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton's work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim...