Workshopping Black Radicalism: The Left, Iowa, and Literary History

Within midcentury Black literature were two influential and overlapping, yet ideologically different, cultural forces: the writers’ groups of the US Communist left and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW), the founding and flagship program of the academic discipline of creative writing. During this time, the Communist Party of the United States backed a range of writing groups, workshops, journals, and other literary organizations that supported Black writers and critics, while by the 1950’s th...