Richard Wright Archive
The Spatialization of Fiction
Spatial conflicts and curiosities (the lighthearted call to the open road, for example) can undergird the entire momentum and tone of a novel. Without knowing a character’s place in the world, it’s challenging to gather the full context of their decisions.
James Baldwin in the Archive
What evolved from an unfinished novel manuscript, through a decades-long struggle with the legacy of Richard Wright, Henry James, and the white Lost Generation, are Baldwin’s 1956 and 1962 books as well as one of his most enduring insights into the struggle to end America’s innocence.
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation
The Hurston/Wright Foundation was founded in 1990 in Washington, D.C. by award-winning author Marita Golden and bibliophile/cultural historian Clyde McElvene.
In Sickness: Feeling Unwell in the Wake of the U.S. Election
In the days after the U.S. presidential election last month, people became sick. Friends, colleagues, and mere acquaintances narrated their symptoms.
Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #2–The Book as Companion
Examining painful truths, I left behind the stories. I developed an aversion to reading. When I picked up a book, it was as if my brain closed a door. How could I, a writer and an English professor, no longer have a desire to read?
Other Countries
Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Black Writer In America is a cosmopolitan entity. The news can do that to you, even in February. Obviously there’s Harlem, and before that, there was the mass exodus from the South to the North, to experience life among people who