McCaskill, Barbara
TR 11:10 AM
Park Hall 0136
This iteration of the Southern Literature class will focus on the exciting contributions that African American writers have made in many genres. Works that we will study will include: The Age of Phillis, an acclaimed poetry collection inspired by the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters and written by Honoree Fannone Jeffers (Georgia); the short story collection If I had Two Wings by magic realist writer Randall Kenan (North Carolina); the poetry collection Backbone by Greenville, South Carolina's poet laureate Glenis Redmond and her dramatic collaborations with the University of Delaware's Sharing Our Legacy dance theatre; Atlanta, Georgia's own Tayari Jones's novel An American Marriage; the novel Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, a postcard to the rural South and Gullah Geechee culture; perennial favorite Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Florida, Alabama);.and what is now the first known novel written by an African American woman, The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts (South Carolina). Dr. Gregg Hecimovich, editor of the recently published edition of Crafts' novel, will present a talk in the Ballew Lecture Series about how he pieced together the biography of Craft, a fugitive from southern slavery, and why her story is a significant contribution to southern literature and American letters.