African American Women Writers Research Articles

De-silencing the Past: Postmemory and Reparative Writing in Selected Works by African-American Women Writers

De-silencing the Past: Postmemory and Reparative Writing in Selected Works by African-American Women Writers

Colorism, Passing for White, and Intertextuality in Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half: Rewriting African American Women's Literary Tradition

This article draws on various theories and studies about the color line, colorism, and racial passing in African American culture, history, and literature to examine the themes of colorism and passing for white in Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half. This article juxtaposes Bennett’s novel alongside earlier works written by twentieth-century African American women writers, underscoring Bennett’s intertextual influences, which include Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and God Help the Child (2015). As Bennett revises and incorporates earlier novels into her own, she redeems tragic female characters such as Pecola Breedlove and Clare Kendry, highlights the persistence and damage of colorism, updates the passing narrative, and defies stereotypes about Black women. It concludes that in The Vanishing Half, Bennett proposes a fresh path for twenty-first-century African American fiction through the themes of colorism and passing for white in her rewriting of African American women’s literary tradition.

The Power of Laughter: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Racial and Gender Politics of Humor

ABSTRACT Humor by African American women writers has been largely overlooked and undervalued owing in part to the misguided expectation of feminine, subordinate behavior that precludes the expression of aggression and irreverence associated with humor. This article reappraises Jessie Redmon Fauset’s reputation as a sentimental, bourgeois female writer, looking at how she uses irony and satire to challenge racial and gender stereotypes and become a pioneering female humorist of the Harlem Renaissance. In her essay “The Gift of Laughter” and her best-known novel, Plum Bun (1928), Fauset uses humor as an indirect form of social protest to subvert racial and gender stereotypes of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman and to unsettle bourgeois, sentimental conventions of the marriage plot and the passing plot. Through a reframing of Fauset’s novel in light of recent theories of Black feminist humor, this article helps to restore Fauset’s rightful place among the leading and lasting voices of the Harlem Renaissance.

Self-Discovery and a Sense of Wholeness in the Transgressive Auto/biogrAfrical Discourses of African American Women Writers

Self-Discovery and a Sense of Wholeness in the Transgressive Auto/biogrAfrical Discourses of African American Women Writers

Reading Black Female Voices in Spain: Towards a translation history of African American women’s literature

This paper presents a descriptive approach to the reception of African American women’s literature in Spain through the study of its translation history. In this context, the first part of the paper describes the endeavor of developing AfroBib, a bibliographical tool that compiles exhaustive data about translations of African American women authors published in Spain. The second part of the paper discusses the translation history of African American women’s literature in the target country based on the statistical analysis of the data provided by our main research tool. The results display clear evidence of the increase in the circulation of African American women’s works and illustrate a complex network of social and literary factors that have influenced choices and strategies governing the translation of African American women writers in the country. This study offers unprecedented data, thereby holding out the prospect of encouraging parallel research lines.

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Examining mothering: Race and abjection in Wilson’s Our Nig and Walker’s The Color Purple

The end of slavery sought to grant freedom to Blacks. However, a plethora of African-American novels portray different impressions that this perception of freedom is not as entailed as should be. African-American women writers have subtly and bluntly, portrayed how the African-American mother characters in their novels deal with segregation and abjection as freed women in the society. Employing the Race theory, this paper focuses on mothering as a unique and complex practice of motherhood that empowers the African-American woman and as a non-patriarchal experience in Walker‟s The Color Purple and Wilson‟s Our Nig. The paper concludes that Walker and Wilson‟s novels analysed in this paper are hinged on race and abjection through the mother characters as well as thematic issues discussed in the study. This paper also has implications for African-American studies.

Representation of Marginalization in the Life Writing of African American Women Writers

The process of imperialism and colonialism was established on the covert idea of economic and political exploitation of the underdeveloped eastern cultures by the dominant west. With the process of decolonization, the marginalized and the poor have been given a centre space alongwith the reversal of the order where those who were the object for centuries, suddenly refuse to be subjected to misrepresentation and domination, and begin to constitute their own discourses. Literature serves as a medium of honest self expression and platform to express the true self for women. American society has triply disempowered and disenfranchised African American women on the basis of race, gender and class. Many African American women writers attempt to break down traditional structures and dislocate narrative strategies in order to re-examine subject identity and to demonstrate the complexity of female experience. By writing about their lives the marginalized are valorized and their oppression turns into empowerment. Life writing helps females to explore subjectivity and to assume authorship of their own life. The account of the life of African American women writers chronicles their frequent encounters with racism, sexism and classism as they describe the people, events and personal qualities that helped them to survive the devastating effects of their environment.

Жіночі голоси протесту: поезія Соні Санчес і Ніккі Джованні

The paper explores contemporary African American women’s protest poetry in the light of the liberation movements of the mid-20th century – Black Power, Black Arts Movement, Second Wave Feminism. The research focuses on political, social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the Black women’s resistance poetry, its spirited dialogue with the feminist struggle, and undertakes its critical interpretation using the methodological tools of Cultural Studies. The poetics and style of protest poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, whose literary works have received little scholarly attention literary studies in Ukraine, are analyzed. Protest poetry is defined as politically and socially engaged verse which is oppositional, contestatory and resistant in its subject matter, as well as in the form of (re)presentation. Focusing on political and societal issues, such as slavery, racism, segregation, gender inequality, African American protest poetry is characterized by discourse of resistance and confrontation, disruption of standard English grammar, as well as conventional spelling and syntax. It is argued that militant poems of Sonia Sanchez are marked by the imitations of black speech rhythms and musical patterns of jazz and blues. Similarly, Nikki Giovanni relies on the oral tradition of African American people while creating poetry which was oriented towards performance. The linguistic content of Sanchez and Giovanni’s verses is lowercase lettering for notions associated with “white america”, obscenities targeted at societal racist practices, and erratic capitalization, nonstandard spacing, onomatopoeic syllables, use of vernacular as markers of Black culture. The works of African American women writers, which are under analysis in the essay, constitute creative poetic responses to traumatic history of African American people. Protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni explicitly express the rhetoric of Black nationalism and comply with the aesthetic principles of the Black Arts movement. They are perceived as consciousness-raising texts by their creators and the audiences they are addressed to. It is argued that although protest and resistance poetry is time- and context-bound, it can transcend the boundaries of historical contexts and act as timeless texts.

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent

Reviewed by: Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent Kara B. Clevinger HER VOICE WILL BE ON THE SIDE OF RIGHT: GENDER AND POWER IN WOMEN’S ANTEBELLUM ANTISLAVERY FICTION, by Holly M. Kent. American Abolitionism and Antislavery. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017. 216 pp. $55.00 cloth; $46.99 ebook. Was the nineteenth-century woman empowered by the ideologies of true womanhood and separate spheres, or was she confined within the home? This question has defined a persistent debate for scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s literature since it was proposed by Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Douglas’s critique of the anti-intellectualism of much of women’s literature, clustered under the broad term “sentimentalism,” and Tompkins’s reclamation of that literature and the cultural work it performs, as well as the opening up of the canon of American literature, have inspired countless critical studies of women’s writing that have spanned the range of women’s empowerment. At this point, scholars of the nineteenth century agree: it is complicated. Holly M. Kent’s Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction makes a significant contribution to this debate and the field of antebellum literary scholarship, as Kent explores how women writers intellectually and imaginatively considered the position of women as abolitionist activists and agitators in the United States between 1821 and 1861, arguing that white women writers conceived of gender, not race, as the most significant barrier to social justice and equality. Beginning with early antislavery fiction in the 1820s and the optimism of women writers’ belief that morally superior women could abolish slavery and de-corrupt men, Kent traces a decline in the hope for white women’s ability to effect change in a patriarchal society during each decade leading up to the Civil War. Much of the antislavery fiction Kent analyzes has received little attention from literary scholars, and thus her book is as much a recovery project as it is a compelling assessment of the productions of female antislavery fiction writers. Kent reads short and long-form fiction from well-known authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lydia Maria Child, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She also introduces readers to a valuable sampling of lesser-known and [End Page 453] anonymous authors, such as African American writer Sarah Mapps Douglass, who contributed fiction for young readers to The Liberator, including a piece in August 1832 in which she does not reveal that the virtuous young female protagonist is African American until the end, hoping her young audience will learn a moral lesson in shame for their racist assumptions. Kent places Douglass’s short story within a fascinating comparison of African American and white women writers of antislavery fiction to demonstrate how African American authors took up debates about what society might look like after emancipation, while white authors focused on the liberation plot and held back from writing what came after emancipation. One of the more intriguing conclusions Kent comes to is that white women authors became increasingly uncomfortable with relinquishing conventional ideals of white middle-class femininity and could only imagine African American female characters embodying or desiring these traits rather than portraying new and diverse models of womanhood. The triumph of Kent’s book is the valuable contributions it makes to a number of scholarly conversations about the nineteenth century: antislavery fiction and abolitionist activism, domestic literature and separate spheres ideology, theories of public and private spheres, and the historiography of women and authorship. Kent intervenes in each of these conversations, placing her magnifying glass over fiction and examining how women imagined antislavery action rather than speculating on women’s lived experiences at the time. The result is an insightful and pure literary studies monograph, which is thoroughly researched with expert attention to secondary sources and a rich array of primary sources that made use of wonderful collections at the Boston Library, Smith College, and the Historical Societies of Massachusetts and...

Visualizing the uplift: digitizing poetry by African American women, 1900–1922

ABSTRACT“Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance: African American Women Writers, 1900–1922,” aims to digitize and annotate a limited array of primary texts, mainly poetry, and present these materials as a digital archive in the Scalar platform. The project aligns with what Kim Gallon has referred to as a “technology of recovery,” which is one of the core principles bridging African American literary studies and the digital humanities. The project uses Scalar’s visualization and tagging structures to explore stylistic, thematic, and social relationships among a small group of writers, as well as to explore the conversations these writers were having with established writers and editors. Several key themes have begun to emerge as the project has developed. The first of these is the confrontation with American racism, which impacted African American communities intensely in the 1910s; and these poets document the emergence racial violence and the response to that violence. Second, these poets show how the role of African American motherhood was evolving in the early years of the twentieth-century, in part because of the stresses of raising children in a racist society. Third, the black Church became strongly connected to the movement for social justice at this time; and several, if not most, of the writers in this archive explored Christian themes in their anti-racist writing.

Studies on Toni Morrison’s Beloved From the Cultural Perspective

Toni Morrison is the history of American literature and the first African-American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. So far, Morrison has written nine novels, in which she continued to pay attention to the historical destiny of black people and their spirit world. As a black woman writer’s unique identity, she paid special attention to the fate of black women. Beloved is Toni Morrison’s fifth works, which was published in 1987 in the United States. Its publication bought strong social shock and numerous literary critics and scholars to evaluate her works from different angles in a variety of literary theory. Through careful reading of the text, this paper tried to study this novel from the cultural perspective, which provides a new direction for the readers to study Toni Morrison’s Beloved . At the same time, readers and critics can better study Morrison’s literary works and her superb writing skills.

Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African-American Women Writers

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The Characteristics and Growth of the Black Women Embodied in Beloved

Beloved is a great novel that typifies the vantage of Toni Morrison, the first African American woman writer who won the Nobel Prize. In this novel, Toni Morrison reveals great and indelible contribution to the African American literature. It is Toni Morrison that makes the scholars of the American critical circle pay much attention to the interior world of the black women. In her fictional world, Toni Morrison reflected miseries, abnormalities and distortions of the black women’s feeling and mind under the oppressions of racism and sexism. As one of the important figures of Beloved , all kinds of the description of the black women contributes a lot to the success of the image-shaping. As for the structure of this paper, it divides into four parts: Brief introduction to the novel, the characteristics and growth of the black women, and the final conclusion. This paper mainly attempts to discuss the characteristics and growth of the black women in the novel. By analyzing the changes of the black women in the novel, it will show you a special and unique realistic perspective.

“Teach His People the Value of Unity”: Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson’s Pocomania

“Teach His People the Value of Unity”: Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson’s Pocomania Raj Chetty (bio) Caribbean women’s literature that does not fit male-centered regimes of blackness is often left out of genealogies of black thought. Such appears to be the case of the early-twentieth-century Jamaican poet, playwright, radio programmer, and activist Una Marson, who “altered London theatre history by bringing, for the first time, all-black casts to the stage in serious drama” and “directly confronted the double bind of colonial imitation.”1 Marson has been obscured by canonical Caribbean male writers who followed her and for whom she helped create a platform through the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Victor Reid, and Derek Walcott, in the midcentury boom of anticolonial and postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean writers.2 Alison Donnell has been particularly critical of the “origin” stories of West Indian literature that begin with these writers, to the neglect of Marson, “a black Jamaican woman whose experiences and achievements provided a link to all these major movements and figures.”3 Denise deCaires Narain is even more direct: if Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is “a text which is read as providing early examples of diasporic figures,” Marson’s work “provides a useful reminder that some of these migrants were women.”4 Marson’s literary works have also been obscured by the more pronouncedly black- and Afrocentric poetics and politics of Caribbean, African American, and black British women writers in the 1970s and 1980s.5 Donnell has noted that critical attention to black Caribbean women writers tends to “[concentrate] [End Page 20] on contemporary, diasporic, African Caribbean women.”6 Thus, much like the “emergence” of West Indian literature noted above, the constitution in the 1990s of a canon of Anglophone Caribbean women writers traces its origins to the 1970s, with writers like Merle Hodge, Erna Brodber, and Lorna Goodison figuring prominently at the expense of earlier writers like Marson.7 These early writers gain admission into this canon, it seems, so long as they can be conscripted into the kind of “Black Atlanticism” that has come to dominate literary studies and critical theory in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s work (and, ironically, at the expense of black diasporic feminist criticism and black feminist internationalism predating Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic). Or, earlier writers are admissible so long as they fit neatly within a postcolonial feminist framework.8 Meant to disparage neither women writers since the 1970s nor the critical approaches that coincide with their emergence into critical view in the 1990s, such an argument foregrounds the conditions under which certain texts are embraced in a postcolonial, diasporic, post-national now, and others left behind in a colonial, pre-diasporic, nationalist, pre-“third wave” feminist past. To be sure, Marson’s oeuvre is fraught with contradictions in both its feminism and its antiracism, one possible reason for her uneasy fit within dominant Black Atlantic and feminist molds. Nonetheless, rather than tailoring Marson’s work for a Black Atlantic or postcolonial feminist fitting, perhaps both black diasporic thought and black feminist thought should be reshaped around Marson’s work. Thus, taking a cue from deCaires Narain, I argue there is something apart from “the undeniable archival importance of retrieving” Marson from literary-historical obscurity: her work speaks not only to current conceptualizations of black diaspora but forces such conceptualizations to consider the place of black women like Marson within them.9 Marson’s 1938 play Pocomania dissatisfies those readers of black diaspora literature who see Afrocentrism as the effective or most effective counter to anti-African and antiblack racism. Without a doubt, the play is antiracist, as the vibrant religious life, complex subjectivities, and politics all are located in exclusively black and brown—that is, Afro-descendent—Jamaican social worlds. While the play connects the religious revivalism of the Afro-creolized Pocomania tradition with African traditions, its focus is not in authenticating the Africanness of Jamaican culture. Instead, Pocomania contrasts Jamaican yard life, and specifically the tradition of Pocomania within it, with Jamaican middle-class life and its emphasis on proper Christian behavior, belief...

Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into

African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century

African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century

Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and Two Representations of Live Jazz Perfomance

This article is a comparative study of Ann Petry's 1947 short story Solo on the Drums and segments of Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting . . . that were almost certainly drafted several years later.1 I believe Petry's masterful Solo on the Drums could have been Ellison's inspiration for the jazz club scene Book One, chapter ten, which is a culmination of the action that begins chapter nine (a long, coherent flashback sequence). This claim can probably never be proved one way or the other. But if Ellison arrived at the scenario-in which jazz induces a reverie a recently love-jilted man-completely on his own, then his mind was working much like that of Petry, and their representations of jazz-induced reverie could be taken together as significant statements about one way jazz may have been apprehended and experienced at this time.Both narratives portray the effects of a jazz performance on an emotionally troubled character. Attempts to relate the effects of live jazz on the psyche go back to at least the 1920s. Rudolph Fisher's short story Common Meter and Zora Neale Hurston's essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me furnish good examples. But Petry adds another dimension to the representation of the experience of the music and explicitly explores the effect of a jazz performance on a character who has suffered a personal romantic loss earlier the day on which the performance takes place. The character experiences a reverie that drifts from personal heartbreak into commentary on a wider sense of political and cultural loss. Ellison portrays a similar scenario across chapters nine and ten. What could this mean for the study of Ellison's influences, especially those that have gone unacknowledged or have not been explored adequately? And what might it suggest about Petry as a sort of alternative jazz critic?First, I consider the question of whether Ellison could have read Petry's story when it appeared. Next, I note how jazz writing opportunities were generally closed to women, especially African American women (and were not especially open to African American men). Furthermore, I raise the question of how Petry's oeuvre might have looked had she had the opportunity to use her knowledge of jazz nonfiction feature pieces, as Ellison did (following the success of Invisible Man). I then discuss what Petry's parallel exploration and representation of jazz performance might mean for the phenomenology of listening-the sense of being music-that Ellison began to develop Invisible Man, where he focused on recorded music.2 He appears to expand upon this idea of being in music Three Days Before the Shooting . . . one of the most significant representations of live music his oeuvre. I then discuss Petry as a possible literary precursor of Ellison (with regard to the representation of jazz performance) and ask what this could mean for understanding the influence of women writers, particularly African American women writers, on Ellison's work.In his second novel, Ellison takes up the theme and imagery of music performed live a way that he does not Invisible Man. Music general plays a more significant role his second novel. Reverend Alonzo Hickman, a cen - tral character, is a former jazz musician and is nicknamed God's Trombone. There is a section about Hickman's early days as a trombonist.3 Chapter four of Book One is about a jazz bassist.4In his 1955 essay Living With Music, Ellison writes of purposefully distancing himself from music (in which he'd majored at Tuskegee) during his early years New York so that he could focus on becoming a writer.5 During this period, the late 1930s and 1940s, he tried to break clean with music, and, general, this effort is reflected his writing.6 In Living With Music, he writes of reengaging with music seriously 1949.7 Invisible Man initially did not have much, if anything, to do with jazz.8 The famous passages the novel's prologue about Louis Armstrong were late additions. …

Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker by Carolyn J. Brown

643 Book Review achieve universal meaning” (xiii), and Rivera’s novel certainly fits this bill. Rough South, Rural South enriches our study of Rough South fiction both by surveying the genre’s history and by prodding us to envision new possibilities for its future. University of Alabama Jolene Hubbs Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker, by Carolyn J. Brown, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 144 pp. $20.00 cloth. MARGARET WALKER, A LONG-TIME RESIDENT OF JACKSON AND PROFESSOR of English at Jackson State College (now University), is the subject of Carolyn J. Brown’s biography, published in 2014. Having recently completed a biography of fellow Jackson resident Eudora Welty, Brown discloses in her “Author’s Note” that she discovered Walker through casual reading concerning Mississippi writers. It is in this mode that Brown continued her exploration of Walker’s life through her writing, friendships, and professional accomplishments. This book fills a particular niche in the area of academic research because it is written as an introduction to a writer rather than as a critical assessment of that writer’s merits. Readership is addressed explicitly when Brown writes that her biography is “targeting middle-school and high-school-age students as well as the general reader” (xii). The book certainly fulfills its promise to promote a worthy author, as Brown states that she “hope[s] that I have done her story justice. . . . [and] introduce[d] her to a new generation of readers” (xiii). Arranged chronologically, the ten short chapters chronicle Walker’s journey through life by relying heavily on an unpublished manuscript of Walker’s. autobiography and the repository of her papers housed in the Center that bears her name at Jackson State. Each chapter is liberally sprinkled with photographs, some of which seem to be stock images while others are clearly intimate snapshots from Walker’s own collection. Scholar Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas, provided amplematerialaswell,and is generously (and appropriately) thankedfor doingso.Graham’sbiographyonWalkerisforthcomingandwillcontain more critical discussion of Walker’s life and work. 644 Mississippi Quarterly Appendices devoted to Walker’s life, major published works, major honors and awards, and the general milieu of her accomplishments provide useful reference guides. Frequent quotations from Walker’s poetry, prose, and manuscripts also round out the depiction of Walker’s major insights and the influences on her writing. Perhaps for the uninformed reader, a brief summary of her novel, Jubilee, and major poetry editions would have been helpful. This biography just touches on the events surrounding Walker’s life—enough that the reader will want to more fully explore her writings.Walker’saccomplishmentsareindeedastounding.Forexample, she attended The University of Iowa’s MFA program in its earliest stages, returning to complete her doctorate years later and to finish her dissertation, which would eventually be her most famous work, Jubilee. Her civil rights work began in the late 1960s; when two student protestors were killed by police at Jackson State in 1970, Walker was called to testify before the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. She would go on to become a leading Democratic voice in state and national politics. Walker also established one of the country’s first African American studies programs at Jackson State at her Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, which twenty-one years later would be renamed in her honor. Finally, Walker’s commitment to African American women’s writing, through the groundbreaking conference on Phillis Wheatley’s life and legacy in 1973, is in and of itself a legacy worth exploring. Walker’s own poetry commemorates this event, which a who’s who of African American women writers attended. Quoting Nikki Giovanni, Brown successfully fulfills the mission that she setouttoaccomplishbypublicizing “the most famous person nobody knows” (xi) through this biography. Let’s hope that it whets the appetite to read, not just Jubilee and Walker’s poetry, but the myriad of African American writers, particularly African American women writers, who are also part of her “Song.” Mississippi University for Women Amy Pardo ...