Natasha Trethewey, photo by Jalissa Gray, CC BY SA
Alice Walker, photo by Florida Memory, No Known Copyright Restrictions
Alice Walker
Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker is indisputably one of the leading figures of contemporary African American literature. Author of four novels, two collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and four volumes of poetry, Walker writes of African American women's discovery of their inner selves, selves from which they draw the strength necessary for survival. Drawing on her own background as the daughter of Georgia sharecroppers, Walker has in her works given voice to previously invisible poor rural black women. The overwhelming theme of Walker's work is survival, the survival of the whole self. Walker's personal odyssey, from her southern rural roots, to Sarah Lawrence College (where she came near the brink of suicide), to her discovery of inner peace through self-knowledge and rootedness in the tradition that bore her, informs all of her work. Her central characters, like Walker herself, come to recognize and acknowledge the divine both within themselves and in every thing in the universe. In this study, Donna Haisty Winchell provides a comprehensive study of Walker's entire body of work, including her poetry (often neglected in other critical works), and her most recent novel The Temple of My Familiar. Combining biographical information with critical analysis of Walker's works, Winchell provides a sensitive and insightful overview of this important writer's canon. Her study will be must reading for everyone interested in contemporary American literature, and a necessity for school and college library collections.
Conversations with Natasha Trethewey by
United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother informs each book, Trethewey’s range of forms and subjects is wide. In compact sonnets, elegant villanelles, ballad stanzas, and free verse, she creates monuments to mixed-race children of colonial Mexico, African American soldiers from the Civil War, a beautiful prostitute in 1910 New Orleans, and domestic workers from the twentieth-century North and South. Because her white father and her black mother could not marry legally in Mississippi, Trethewey says she was “given” her subject matter as “the daughter of miscegenation.” A sense of psychological exile is evident from her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), to the recent Thrall (2012). Biracial people of the Americas are a major focus of her poetry and her prose book Beyond Katrina, a meditation on family, community, and the natural environment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney. She emotionally acknowledges Rita Dove’s large impact, and she boldly positions herself in the southern literary tradition of Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Commenting on “Pastoral,” “South,” and other poems, Trethewey guides readers to deeper perception and empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni began to write poetry in the 1960s when she was associated with the radical Black Arts Movement. She has since won a large popular following of a kind rarely achieved by poets in American society. Many ordinary people read, memorize, and recite her work, and her public readings are invariably well attended. Indeed, Giovanni's popular success has perhaps caused academic critics to underestimate the depth and breadth of her work. A strong-minded and independent woman, Giovanni has always resisted pigeon-holing, whether by literary critics or political ideologues. In this study, Virginia C. Fowler provides a ground-breaking survey and interpretation of Giovanni's work, thus filling a significant gap in contemporary literary studies. Fowler's close readings of Giovanni's work elucidate the orality of her poetry and the often subtle ways in which the poet has been influenced by spirituals, the blues, and jazz. In addition, the social, political, and biographical contexts that helped to shape Giovanni's poetry are sensitively delineated, as are the gender issues and personal concerns that became especially important in her verse of the 1970s. Giovanni's formal experimentation also receives its first extended treatment here. In the end, Giovanni is shown to be a poet of universal appeal, whose work reaches past barriers of race, class, and gender to touch the common humanity of her many readers while remaining deeply rooted in the rich tradition of African-American literature. This study will be valuable to all students of contemporary literature and especially to those interested in the contribution of women of color to our cultural life. An especially notable feature of thisvolume is a candid interview with Giovanni, in which the poet discusses her life, work, and contemporaries.
Nikki Giovanni Photo by David Quinn CC BY
