Updates from Affiliate Programs

HBW Celebrates 40th Anniversary in 2023

The History of Black Writing (HBW) began its 40th anniversary year with a plenary session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference in San Francisco, “The History of Black Writing (HBW) at 40 and Beyond: Literary Recovery, Archives, and Digital Communities.” A reception at the College Language Association (CLA) Convention in Atlanta featured the authors of three major Black biographies, Half in Shadows: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay by Shanna Greene Benjamin; Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Tara T. Green; and The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker by Maryemma Graham, HBW’s founding director.

The events helped to highlight HBW’s importance as the only dedicated center for the study of the Black book, and its ongoing efforts to bring increased attention to Black writing through digital preservation and expanded research opportunities. In this second year of grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, HBW’s student staff includes over 25 researchers organized into teams led by graduate student coordinators. HBW’s digital operations office is based in Watson Library, which supports the HBW Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP).

The external grant funding provides greater access to the growing number of texts in the HBW corpus, whose inventory of novels has increased by 114% in the past year with 6,785 titles currently identified. Many of these have been digitized, and the full text of some of the out-of-copyright novels are available through the University of Chicago Textual Optics Lab’s user platform PhiloLogic. Further, the team has sourced 567 memoirs written by Black authors to be added to the HBW corpus. Additionally, we welcomed the fifth and sixth cohorts of BBIP Scholars, who train, research and publish using digital methods. HBW’s highly effective social platforms – all student-run – are responsible for sharing HBW’s wide range of successful public programming with an international audience. One such public program was the tenth Black Literary Suite (BLS). The Fall 2022 BLS exhib- it highlighted Afro-Latinx authors and texts from different cultures within the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American diaspora. These texts focused on reclaiming historical and cultural narratives.

The Mellon funding for “The Black Literature Network” also made it possible for HBW to increase our collaborators for greater impact and inclusion. This joint effort includes the IRIS Digital Humanities Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville with Co-PI Howard Rambsy; the University of Texas Arlington with Co-PI and HBW alum Kenton Rambsy; and KU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science with Co-PI Drew Davidson. The intent is to provide more opportunities for public access to Black texts. Thus far, the Black Literature Network has produced 75 podcast episodes under the title “Remarkable Receptions,” which are available in any podcast app; 25 literary briefs; 33 data visualizations; and the Current Archives and Collections Index (CACI), an online searchable bibliography with information about Black-themed collections.

NEH funding for “Building Literacy and Curating Critical Cultural Knowledge in Digital Humanities” and “Black Book Interactive Project III” allowed us to continue our partnership with the HathiTrust Research Center and Afro-Publishing Without

Walls. Co-PI Marilyn Thomas-Houston and her team at the University of Illinois lead the training program and peer-reviewed publication process for the BBIP Scholars Program cohorts.

As part of its 40th anniversary events, HBW will extend its public outreach with a major exhibition titled “Black writing,” organized by HBW Director Ayesha Hardison and Joey Orr, curator at the Spencer Museum of Art. The exhibit will run from August 19, 2023 – January 7, 2024 and will showcase works engaging Black literature, reading, and language. In addition to extending HBW’s goals through visual culture, the exhibition will include a reading space featuring select books and a video installation featuring documents from HBW’s archive.

Finally, HBW would like to recognize graduating staff members Kai Hansen (BA English), Mahala Higginbotham (BA English), Venkata Karasani (MS Computer Science), David Miller (Ph.D. English), Victoria Garcia Unzueta (BS Journalism), Lucy Whittington (BA English), and Brendan Williams-Childs (MFA Creative Writing – Fiction). These team members have made major contributions to all areas of HBW’s work. We are proud of their academic achievements and wish them success with their new endeavors.