This fall three books published bear an unusual connection in the marketplace. All three writers were members of a writer's group conducted at Bowie State University over five years ago.
Bowie State University is Maryland's oldest Historically Black University (HBCU). The school began in 1865 just after the Civil War and has continued to foster an educational environment for young African Americans seeking education for over one-hundred and fifty years. Currently, the school enrolls over five thousand students and is best known for its College of Education.
Creative Writing is a different matter. It is an unusual distinction for the HBCU. Bowie is one of the few HBCUs offering a Creative Writing concentration. In 1997, literary activist Ethelbert Miller, led an initiative in conjunction with AWP to establish Creative Writing Programs at HBCUs. At Bowie, for many years the only Professor was Jenise Williamson whose concentration is fiction. For years she manned the classes alone.
In 2011, Rion Amilcar Scott, Valerie Sweeney Prince, and Bro. Yao decided to get together and read each other's manuscripts. They made their connection on the long hallway in the Martin Luther King, Jr. building in the Department of English and Modern Languages on Bowie State's campus. It is a strange concrete building built during the seventies that looks more like a stone fortress than a place where the humanities are taught. There are few windows.
The small writer's group was a chance to get together and talk about the work that often sustains the English Professors trudging through students who often ask, "Why do I have to take this class?" The response could very easily be,"You have to take this class, because you have to take this class!" The majority of humanities courses taught are mandated by the curriculum. The creative writer in the HBCU must confront the same challenge most humanities professors face in a slightly different environment. At the HBCU, the idea of training and educating African Americans to become writers is rather low on the list. Granted Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Yona Harvey, and many other African American authors have attended HBCUs, but in current times the Ivy League holds weight even when it comes to Creative Writing.
It is a strange feature of the age of Black Lives Matter that the HBCU sinks into the background. In matters of struggle, the African American’s confrontation with white structures of power seem to be privileged over the black confrontation with what some call Free Black Space. For in Free Black Space restrictions on radicalism and speech lay, to some degree, outside the walls of the institution. In fact, in previous decades of struggle this Free Black Space was an essential feature of radicalism. Yet today, the HBCU seems just outside the view of radicalism. These institutions, especially in terms of creative arts, have been marginalized by segregation. But there are still pockets of hope that give rise to alternative perspectives.
The challenge is the HBCU's English Department is primarily a service department, that in the current educational environment, has difficulty attracting authors to its faculty. And writers hired by the HBCU tend not to stay. In the post segregation educational market, African American authors of note, much like athletes who dream of being professionals, seek employment at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). The advantages are obvious: lighter course loads, more focused research, higher salaries, and fewer composition courses. But there are downsides there as well. The PWI environment is one whose demographics represent the opposite of the HBCU. The talk of micro-aggressions and the recent spotlight on racist incidents on college campuses in conjunction with Black Lives Matter, offers a different narrative than the one many HBCU professors and students experience. In the larger arc one conclusion to be drawn is that the HBCU environment allows the writer to pursue their artistic vision in conjunction with an immersion into African American culture that gives rise to a black perspective in writing.
And now, five years after these authors formed a reading circle, each of the authors is publishing their manuscript this year with three different presses. It seems that the environment in the HBCU English Department has served them well.
Daughter's Exchange, Prince's second book, will be published by Alternative Book Press, Glover’s Inheritance, his first collection of poems, will be released through Willow Books; and Scott's Insurrections, will be published by Kansas University Press. There's diversity in the work: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories, and a lyrically rendered piece of non-fiction prose that represents a blending of the best of academic scholarship with a twist of testimony and the voice of ancestors.
More on Rion Scott's Insurrections Here
More on Bro. Yao's Inheritance Here
Bowie State University is Maryland's oldest Historically Black University (HBCU). The school began in 1865 just after the Civil War and has continued to foster an educational environment for young African Americans seeking education for over one-hundred and fifty years. Currently, the school enrolls over five thousand students and is best known for its College of Education.
Creative Writing is a different matter. It is an unusual distinction for the HBCU. Bowie is one of the few HBCUs offering a Creative Writing concentration. In 1997, literary activist Ethelbert Miller, led an initiative in conjunction with AWP to establish Creative Writing Programs at HBCUs. At Bowie, for many years the only Professor was Jenise Williamson whose concentration is fiction. For years she manned the classes alone.
In 2011, Rion Amilcar Scott, Valerie Sweeney Prince, and Bro. Yao decided to get together and read each other's manuscripts. They made their connection on the long hallway in the Martin Luther King, Jr. building in the Department of English and Modern Languages on Bowie State's campus. It is a strange concrete building built during the seventies that looks more like a stone fortress than a place where the humanities are taught. There are few windows.
The small writer's group was a chance to get together and talk about the work that often sustains the English Professors trudging through students who often ask, "Why do I have to take this class?" The response could very easily be,"You have to take this class, because you have to take this class!" The majority of humanities courses taught are mandated by the curriculum. The creative writer in the HBCU must confront the same challenge most humanities professors face in a slightly different environment. At the HBCU, the idea of training and educating African Americans to become writers is rather low on the list. Granted Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Yona Harvey, and many other African American authors have attended HBCUs, but in current times the Ivy League holds weight even when it comes to Creative Writing.
It is a strange feature of the age of Black Lives Matter that the HBCU sinks into the background. In matters of struggle, the African American’s confrontation with white structures of power seem to be privileged over the black confrontation with what some call Free Black Space. For in Free Black Space restrictions on radicalism and speech lay, to some degree, outside the walls of the institution. In fact, in previous decades of struggle this Free Black Space was an essential feature of radicalism. Yet today, the HBCU seems just outside the view of radicalism. These institutions, especially in terms of creative arts, have been marginalized by segregation. But there are still pockets of hope that give rise to alternative perspectives.
The challenge is the HBCU's English Department is primarily a service department, that in the current educational environment, has difficulty attracting authors to its faculty. And writers hired by the HBCU tend not to stay. In the post segregation educational market, African American authors of note, much like athletes who dream of being professionals, seek employment at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). The advantages are obvious: lighter course loads, more focused research, higher salaries, and fewer composition courses. But there are downsides there as well. The PWI environment is one whose demographics represent the opposite of the HBCU. The talk of micro-aggressions and the recent spotlight on racist incidents on college campuses in conjunction with Black Lives Matter, offers a different narrative than the one many HBCU professors and students experience. In the larger arc one conclusion to be drawn is that the HBCU environment allows the writer to pursue their artistic vision in conjunction with an immersion into African American culture that gives rise to a black perspective in writing.
And now, five years after these authors formed a reading circle, each of the authors is publishing their manuscript this year with three different presses. It seems that the environment in the HBCU English Department has served them well.
Daughter's Exchange, Prince's second book, will be published by Alternative Book Press, Glover’s Inheritance, his first collection of poems, will be released through Willow Books; and Scott's Insurrections, will be published by Kansas University Press. There's diversity in the work: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories, and a lyrically rendered piece of non-fiction prose that represents a blending of the best of academic scholarship with a twist of testimony and the voice of ancestors.
More on Rion Scott's Insurrections Here
More on Bro. Yao's Inheritance Here
