SEMINAR PROFILE

H21 -
African American Fiction and Poetry, the Last 90 Years

From the Harlem Renaissance in the 20s to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize in 1993, African-American writers transformed poetry and fiction in the United States more prominently than any other group of writers. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison did more than any other black fiction writers to make black experience known to white Americans from the Second World War forward, and so in our three-day class we will include Baldwin's love story set in the Harlem of the 1970's, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Toni Morrison's love story set in the Mid-Atlantic of the 1690's, "A Mercy". In 2011, the poet Rita Dove became the first African-American woman to ever edit the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry. We will discuss the effect of her gender and race on the contents of the Anthology in general, and discuss her selections from James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Carl Phillips, among others. We will try to answer, by the end of the class, what Langston Hughes asked in his 1951 poem "Theme for English B." "So will my page be colored that I write?"

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

1/22/2015, 1/30/2015, 2/6/2015

H21 -	African American Fiction and Poetry, the Last 90 Years

	From the Harlem Renaissance in the 20s to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize in 1993, African-American writers transformed poetry and fiction in the United States more prominently than any other group of writers. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison did more than any other black fiction writers to make black experience known to white Americans from the Second World War forward, and so in our three-day class we will include Baldwin's love story set in the Harlem of the 1970's, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Toni Morrison's love story set in the Mid-Atlantic of the 1690's, "A Mercy". In 2011, the poet Rita Dove became the first African-American woman to ever edit the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry. We will discuss the effect of her gender and race on the contents of the Anthology in general, and discuss her selections from James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Carl Phillips, among others. We will try to answer, by the end of the class, what Langston Hughes asked in his 1951 poem "Theme for English B." "So will my page be colored that I write?"

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	1/22/2015, 1/30/2015, 2/6/2015