Featured Speakers and Panelists

Sharon Bridgforth, Visiting Professor of Drama, DePaul University

Sharon Bridgforth has broken ground in the creation and presentation of the performance/novel. Bridgforth’s work has fostered the study of Black lesbian performance literature at Pitzer College; New York University; Temple University; Stanford University; Northwestern University; Tisch School of The Arts; University of California, Berkeley; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and University of Texas, at Austin. Bridgforth has developed a method of facilitating creative writing that she calls Finding Voice, by encouraging writers to consider the page as a canvas; use identity-culture-memory-family-histories-dreams; articulate and examine the socio-political realities of their lives in a form that is part poetry, part oral history, part performance art; examine their creative process; and work in community as they use art as a vehicle for social justice. Her piece blood pudding was in the 2010 New York Summer Stage Festival. Her work has received support from The National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Playwright in Residence Program and the National Performance Network Commissioning Fund. She is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning book, the bull-jean stories, and loveconjure/blues, both published by RedBone Press. She is one of the editors of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, Summer 2010, University of Texas Press.

Marci Blackman

Marci Blackman is the author of two novels and several short works of fiction. Blackman's first novel, Po Mans Child, received the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award for Best LBGT Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best Fiction. The novel was also selected for distribution by the Quality Paperback Book Club. Blackman's second novel, Tradition, a historical murder mystery set in rural Ohio, is currently on submission. In addition, Blackman also co-edited the anthology, Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the novelist's first nonfiction title, Bike NYC: The Cyclist’s Guide to New York City, is due in spring 2011 from Skyhorse Publishing. Blackman is an African American genderqueer born to activist parents during the height of the civil rights movement in Yellow Springs, Ohio, home to Antioch College and the alma mater of Coretta Scott King. Blackman's fiction explores what it means to be other, in communities often deemed other themselves, in an effort to reveal that — in mainstream or fringe — there are more similarities between us than differences. Blackman lives and writes in New York.

Duriel Harris, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois State University

A distinguished and celebrated poet, Duriel Harris has been a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College and Adelphi University. Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies. Her book, Drag, is a compilation of her poetry — a talent and a passion that she discovered as an undergraduate at Yale University. Since 2001, Harris has been performing with Douglas Ewart and Inventions, a Chicago-based jazz ensemble. Harris’s relationship with sound is reflected in her research. She is currently working on “AMNESIAC,” a media art project that will include a book-length poetry collection, DVD, a website, and sound recording. “I am exploring narrative, linguistic, graphic, and performative textuality in the effort to create poems that are paradigms for and means of recovery from traumatic memory loss,” says Harris. She received degrees from Yale University and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and a doctorate from the University of Illinois.

Trudier Harris, Professor Emerita, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor Emerita, taught courses in African American literature and folklore at UNC from 1979 until her retirement in July of 2009. She has also served on the faculties of The College of William and Mary and Emory University and has lectured throughout the United States, as well as in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Her publications include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). She co-edited three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers and edited three additional volumes. She edited New Essays on Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996) for Cambridge University Press and co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998). Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003. Her latest book, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South, was published by Louisiana State University Press in May of 2009. Choice designated it one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles” for 2009 in its “best of the best” listings.

G. Winston James, Author of Poetry and Prose

G. Winston James is a Jamaican-born poet, short fiction writer, essayist, and editor. A former fellow of the Millay Colony for the Arts, he received a masters of fine art degree in fiction from Brooklyn College, and is the author of the poetry collection, The Damaged Good: Poems around Love, and the Lambda Literary Award finalist collection, Lyric: Poems along a Broken Road. His poetry also appears in numerous anthologies and publications, including Milking Black Bull: 11 Black Gay Poets; Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art; and the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthologies, Freedom in This Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, 1979 to the Present; Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS; and The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets. In 2010 his short fiction collection, Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories, was selected as a finalist publication in the categories of “Debut Fiction” for the 22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards; “LGBT Fiction” for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards; and “Gay/Lesbian Fiction” for ForeWord Reviews 2009 Book of the Year Awards. He is a former executive director of the Other Countries: Black Gay Expression artists’ collective and a founding organizer of Fire & Ink: A Writers Festival for GLBT People of African Descent. James is also co-editor of the historic anthologies, Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Writing, and the Lambda Literary Award finalist publication, Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity. For additional information on G. Winston James, visit http://gwinstonjames.com/content/about.

E. Patrick Johnson, Professor and Chair, Performance Studies, Northwestern University

E. Patrick Johnson is professor and chair in the Department of Performance Studies and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is also a Fellow at the ESB Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College. A scholar/artist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, published by Duke University Press in 2003, which won several awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award, the Errol Hill Book Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is also co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology from Duke University Press (2005). His most recent book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South — An Oral History (2008), is published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Randall Kenan, Associate Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Randall Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published by Grove Press in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace & Company. That collection was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. He is also the author of a young-adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and he wrote the text for Norman Mauskopfs’ book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Kenan’s book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, was published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., in 1999, and was nominated for the Southern Book Award. The Fire This Time, a work of nonfiction, was published in July 2007. He has been an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers, and has previously taught at Vassar College, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Duke University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Mississippi. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005.

Charles I. Nero, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, African American Studies, and American Cultural Studies, Bates College

Charles I. Nero is an associate professor of theater and rhetoric and teaches courses in the African American and American Cultural Studies programs. He is acknowledged for his expertise in black gay literature. His essay “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifyin(g) in Contemporary Black Gay Literature” has been republished in numerous literary and cultural studies anthologies. He wrote the entries “Gay Literature” and “Gay” for the new Oxford Encyclopedia of African American Literature. His essay on Langston Hughes appears in Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures; A Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. He has written the introduction for a new and forthcoming edition of Essex Hemphill’s collection of prose and poetry, Ceremonies. His essays about Essex Hemphill and Melvin Dixon appear in the forthcoming Dictionary of Literary Biography: African American Literature in the 21st Century. Nero’s writings also appear in The Howard Journal of Communications; Journal of Multicultural Counseling; Journal of Counseling and Development; Law and Sexuality: A Review of Lesbian and Gay Legal Issues; and Lambda Book Report.

Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of English, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

Robert Reid-Pharr presents an important perspective on African American literature and queer theory. His first book, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American, is a study of nationhood, domesticity, the black body, and gender in antebellum African American literature and culture. His second book, Black Gay Man: Essays, explores his own emotional and intellectual confrontations with the modern world. As the 2002–03 research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he spent the year in Berlin working on his next book, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, and a study of African American cultural and intellectual history in late twentieth-century America. Professor Reid-Pharr received his doctorate in American studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, The University of Michigan

Magdalena J. Zaborowska received her master's degree from Warsaw University, Poland in 1987, and her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1992. Her research focuses on literary and cultural studies; approaches to migrant ethnicities; feminist and race theory; and most recently the intersections of social space with transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. She has taught and been a visiting scholar at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Aarhus University in Denmark, Tulane University, and the University of Michigan, where she is currently professor and director of graduate studies in the Program in American Culture and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Her books include James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP 2009) and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 1995). She also edited or co-edited the collections Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism (Aarhus University Press, 1998); The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001); and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004). Her current projects include a monograph on the proliferation of American notions of race and sexuality in post-Cold War Eastern Europe, titled Racing Borderlands, and In the Company of Women, a project on the black novel and gender.

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