Yesterday I was so pleased to receive an email from Katherine Richter Edge, head of the Mildred Westervelt Warner Museum. I’ve taken my classes to the museum a lot. She shared news of an upcoming exhibit concerning the history of swimming in public sites. Marrs Spring, which my Antebellum America students visited on Wednesday, are… Continue reading on the diaspora and water
I am off to campus to teach. Wearing my red high-top Converse as a homage to one of the protagonists in historian Tiya Miles’ The Cherokee Rose: A Novels of Gardens and Ghosts. My Antebellum America students will be tasked this semester with thinking through how various people make claims to power in the years… Continue reading off to teach…red converse and all
I woke up this morning to a message on Facebook. Elaine Lee, the editor of a 1997 anthology of travel writings by women of African descent, congratulated me on signing a contract for the book on Zora in Honduras and to also share she is working on a an updated version of her book. Hearing… Continue reading travel and a memory lane
This is a Founders’ Day to salute to Norma E. Boyd (1888-1985), a founding member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, my beloved sorority and the first Greek letter organization for women of African descent. Boyd was an educator, member of the first lobbying group that represented the interests of marginalized communities before the United States Congress… Continue reading a founders’ day salute
Happy 131st birthday, Zora Neale Hurston Daughter of Lucy Daughter of John son of Alfred a farmer from Alabama who registered to vote in 1867 Alfred married Amie of Alabama Her parents from South Carolina Alfred and Amy live in Loachapoka, Lee County Alabama Zora from Notasulga, Alabama, where hills roll and a river courses… Continue reading happy 131st birthday, zora!
I began the last day of 2021 watching a 2019 documentary on the difficulties surrounding human control over the Everglades in Florida, my home state. A dear sorority sister earlier viewed it on PBS and wanted me to know how impressed she was to hear the filmmaker citing Zora Neale Hurston‘s observations on the loss… Continue reading projects overlapping with nature in view
I have now gathered all of the illustrations for my book on Zora Neale Hurston’s time in 1940s Honduras. As I uploaded them to Dropbox, I studied one illustration with deep interest again. It is an advertisement for a talk that Hurston gave in Miami. She was in my hometown in late 1949 and 1950,… Continue reading reading a source with new eyes
Gloomy headlines aside, this has been some kind of month in the best of ways. I am so happy! Today I signed a book contract with Johns Hopkins University Press for my book on the legendary Harlem Renaissance writer-anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s time in Honduras in the late 1940s! I was initially interested in Hurston’s… Continue reading zora in honduras book contract news
When the weary eye cannot read another word, the images in this book that just arrived, and the poetry in this book, which also just arrived, are enough. While reading the intro by Edwidge Danticat to Catherine E. McKinley’s The African Lookbook, I was reminded of the Afro-Cuban woman during my 1996 visit to Cuba… Continue reading when the weary eye can’t read another word…
I am getting ready to post the grades for my “American Swagger” class. Sometimes I doubt myself as a teacher, but whenever I read what my students write, I have more confidence. When you’re in the thick of teaching, especially courses that involve deliberate decisions to paint outside the lines lesson plan-wise, doubt comes. The… Continue reading why we do it
catalogue 