Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. PDF Author: John Zheng
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496845455
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous awards, and in 2001 he was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. aims to add an indispensable source to American literature and African American studies. It offers an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture. Throughout the fourteen interviews collected in this volume that range from 1995 to 2021, Ward demonstrates his responsibilities as a contemporary scholar, professor, writer, and social critic. His charming personality glimmers through these interviews, which, in a sense, are inner views that allow us to see into his mind, understand his heart, and appreciate his wit.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. PDF Author: John Zheng
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496845455
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous awards, and in 2001 he was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. aims to add an indispensable source to American literature and African American studies. It offers an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture. Throughout the fourteen interviews collected in this volume that range from 1995 to 2021, Ward demonstrates his responsibilities as a contemporary scholar, professor, writer, and social critic. His charming personality glimmers through these interviews, which, in a sense, are inner views that allow us to see into his mind, understand his heart, and appreciate his wit.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr PDF Author: Jianqing Zheng
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496845467
Category : African American authors
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An indispensable source to American literature and African American studies offering an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture.

Conversations with Gish Jen

Conversations with Gish Jen PDF Author: John Zheng
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496819365
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen’s authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen’s development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen’s insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen’s sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition]

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition] PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006302859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.

Conversations with Margaret Walker

Conversations with Margaret Walker PDF Author: Margaret Walker
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578065127
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Margaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, Conversations with Margaret Walker captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests. The same erudition, wit, and love of language on display in Jubilee comes through in conversations, as well as her sense of moral authority--imbued by a resonant Christian humanism--and her attention to historical detail. In a long 1972 conversation with fellow poet Nikki Giovanni, Walker argues about the tribulations and triumphs of motherhood, the presence of black women in literature, and race relations in American culture from 1900 to the present. With Marcia Greenlee in 1977, she talks extensively about her family's history and her love of botany. In several of the interviews, her friendship with Richard Wright rises to the forefront. Even in her interviews with Claudia Tate and John Griffin Jones, in which the interviewers try to direct the conversations toward the mechanics and thought processes behind Walker's writing, the talks often sweep into broader issues of African American culture, family history, and the past's influence on the present. This collection amply shows that Margaret Walker was a writer who considered her work to be deeply influenced by the culture around her. She viewed her writing as part of her larger life and not separate or distanced from her existence. Bracingly direct, witty, and oddly charming, the writer in Conversations with Margaret Walker is complicated, passionate, forceful, and piercingly intelligent.

Conversations with Lenard D. Moore

Conversations with Lenard D. Moore PDF Author: John Zheng
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496853962
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Known internationally for his Japanese-style poetry, Lenard D. Moore (b. 1958) has published eight poetry collections over the course of his career. Moore has distinguished himself especially in such forms as jazz poetry, haiku, tanka, renga, sequence, and haibun, expressing moments of aesthetic delight as well as a voice enriched with African American culture. Conversations with Lenard D. Moore is a fundamental collection of sixteen interviews with the esteemed writer and former president of the Haiku Society of America. To Moore, jazz is a joyful celebration of American life and culture. The impacts of such great jazz musicians as Max Roach, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Ray Charles are clear in his poetry. The conversations collected here lead the reader into Moore’s creative mind, demonstrating his fusion of African American music, culture, and history into poetry, especially his jazz poetry, jazzku, and bluesku. In interviews that range from 1995 to 2023, Moore reveals his capabilities and responsibilities as a contemporary poet, professor, mentor, editor, and organizer. This volume serves as an indispensable source for writers and readers of poetry and African American literature.

The Other Blacklist

The Other Blacklist PDF Author: Mary Washington
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Revealing the formative influence of 1950s leftist radicalism on African American literature and culture.

Conversations with Experience

Conversations with Experience PDF Author: Andréa Staskowski
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820431284
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
The autobiographical films of German women form a unique body of work. Merging documentary and fiction footage, the filmmakers present a self (de)formed, but not constructed, by social forces. By historicizing, rather than psychologizing, their experience, these filmmakers call prevailing models of subject construction into question. Conversations with Experience examines the social and theoretical context of the films' production and proposes feminist hermeneutics as a theory of textual analysis. Drawing on the insights of Christa Wolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich, feminist hermeneutics recalls ontology as the basis for a conversational approach to critical engagement.

The Other World of Richard Wright

The Other World of Richard Wright PDF Author: Jianqing Zheng
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781617030222
Category : Haiku, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first scholarly consideration of the over eight hundred haiku written late in Wright's life

Trumpeting a Fiery Sound

Trumpeting a Fiery Sound PDF Author: Jacqueline Miller Carmichael
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820325759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
When twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Walker's first collection of poems, For My People, won the Yale Poets Award in 1942, she was just beginning her long and distinguished career as a poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher. When her novel Jubilee was published to great acclaim in 1966, the New York Review of Books said, "[It] chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages." Jubilee is noteworthy for being one of the first novels to present African American history from both a black and female perspective. It is a historical and fictional account of Walker's great-grandmother's life, from slavery through Reconstruction, as told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. In Trumpeting a Fiery Sound, Jacqueline Miller Carmichael examines the novel's genesis and composition, the process of revision and publication, the work's structure and narrative strategies, its use of history and folklore, and its critical reception in the three decades since its first publication.