Featured Speakers and Panelists
Houston A. Baker, Jr. is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Howard University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA. He has taught at Yale, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. Currently, he is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has served as Editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American Literary Studies. Professor Baker began his career as a scholar of British Victorian Literature, but made a career shift to the study of Afro-American literature and culture. He has published or edited more than twenty books. He is the author of more than eighty articles, essays, and reviews. Recent books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T and I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South. His latest book is a critique of black public intellectuals titled Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. Professor Baker is a published poet whose most recent volume is titled Passing Over. He has served in a number of administrative and institutional posts, including the 1992 Presidency of the Modern Language Association of America. His honors include Guggenheim, John Hay Whitney, and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as a number of honorary degrees from American colleges and universities.
Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State and the co-director of the Disability Studies Program. He is the author of six books to date, and has written over a hundred and fifty essays for a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Minnesota Review. He also has contributed articles to several popular venues such as Harper's, The New Yorker, Dissent, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Boston Globe. Bérubé is a member of the advisory board of the Penn State Center for American Literary Studies.
Maryemma Graham, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel; Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice; and several works devoted to Margaret Walker, among other books. Her forthcoming publications include: The Cambridge History of African American Literature; The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker; and Stolen Literacy: A History of the African American Novel. She has also taught at Northeastern University, Harvard University, and the University of Mississippi. Her areas of research include African American and nineteenth century American literature, history of the book, and cultural studies.
Mat Johnson Born and raised in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson grew up in the Germantown and Mount Airy sections of the city. His first novel, Drop, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His second novel, Hunting in Harlem, won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has written for a variety of publications, including a stint as a columnist for Time Out New York. His latest books are The Great Negro Plot, a history of race and hysteria in Colonial New York, and Incognegro, a graphic novel (illustrated by Walter Pleece) set in the 1930s.
Alice Randall is the only African-American woman ever to write a number-one country song. She has had more than twenty songs recorded, including two top ten records and a top forty. Her work includes the only known recorded country songs to explore the subject of lynching. The author of The Wind Done Gone, an unauthorized parody of the American classic Gone With The Wind, Randall was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001, the Literature Award of Excellence by the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002, and she was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. Her most recent book, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, chronicles the tribulations of an African-American professor of Russian literature whose professional football player son plans to marry a Russian dancer. Originally from Detroit, Randall grew up in an enclave of Motown populated almost exclusively with refugees from Alabama. She graduated from Harvard University in 1981 with an honors degree in English and American literature. In 1983 she moved to Nashville to become a country songwriter. She is the mother of Caroline Randall Williams, the great-granddaughter of the Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps, and the wife of attorney David Ewing. (Ewing is a ninth-generation resident of Nashville and a great-great-grandson of Prince Albert Ewing, the first African American to practice law in Tennessee.) The entire family is involved in documenting and preserving the history of people of color in the American South, with particular interest in the history of enslaved women and enslaved children, and in the formerly enslaved who went on to academic achievement.
Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September, 2006. It won the Fiction award for best novel of the year from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for best first novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay “Writers Like Me” from the July 1, 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review appears in the recent anthology Best African-American Essays 2008. Previous nonfiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She was the associate chair of the writing department at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York and has taught there as well. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program and is working on her next novel, to be published by Algonquin Books. Visit Martha Southgate's Web site.
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