Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature

by Ana-Maurine Lara (Editor), drea brown (Editor)

Overview

Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature presents the experiences and voices of Black creative writers who are also teachers. The authors in this collection engage poetry, fiction, experimental literature, playwriting, and literary criticism. They provide historical and theoretical interventions and practical advice for teachers and students of literature and craft. Contributors work in high schools, colleges, and community settings and draw from these rich contexts in their essays. This book is an invaluable tool for teachers, practitioners, change agents, and presses. Teaching Black is for any and all who are interested in incorporating Black literature and conversations on Black literary craft into their own work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822988540
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	12/14/2021
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ana-Maurine Lara (Editor)
Ana-Maurine Lara is a national award-winning novelist, poet, and scholar. She is the author of Erzulie’s Skirt, Kohnjehr Woman, and When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People. Her academic books include Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty and Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic. Lara’s work focuses on questions of Black and Indigenous freedom.

drea brown (Editor)
drea brown is a poet-scholar and author of dear girl: a reckoning, winner of the Gold Line Press 2014 chapbook prize. brown’s forthcoming book, Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women is concerned with haunting and grief, and the impact of these states of being on Black women’s lives and literature.

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword: Black Pedagogy in Context | Joyce A. Joyce Introduction. “Nothing without Intention” | Drea Brown and Ana-Maurine Lara Part 1: The Roux Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation | Toni Morrison The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley | June Jordan Black Studies, All Studies: What Can Black Studies Teach Creative Writing? | John Keene Centering Black Queer Womyn: Today All the Parts of Me Come Along | JP Howard Excerpt from “Nudging the Memory—Creating Performance with the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women” | Rhodessa Jones Provocation 1: cochise be de name I gave dem: dem = student(s) who had dey funeral(s) befo mine | Avery R. Young Part 2: What Is Black? Who’s Afraid? Teaching with Blues Poems: Borrowing from Song to Write about What’s Wrong | Sheila Maldonado Who’s Afraid of Poetry? | Rita Dove What Is Black? | Sarah Webster Fabio Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez | Sonia Sanchez and Susan Kelly ~Teaching Black Diaspora~Yoking Yemoja’s Breath~ | Meta DuEwa Jones A Question of Victory: Teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric | Drea Brown Poetry Is Not a Luxury | Audre Lorde Provocation 2: black out white wash fall out | Gabrielle Civil Part 3: Bearing Witness Baring/Bearing Anger: Race in the Creative Writing Classroom | Toi Derricotte How Much Is Too Much?: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Queering the Classroom | Charles Rice-Gonzalez Not Everything Faced Can Be Changed | Kelly Norman Ellis Teaching as a Practice Rooted in Black Brotherhood | Jamal Adams and F. Douglas Brown You Is Kind, You Is Smart, You Is Important: The Black Female Professor as “the Help” | Lauren K. Alleyne Pony, Swim, or Freeze? | Gabrielle Civil Teaching from the Front Porch | Anastacia-Renee Tolbert Learning to Fly: A Letter to My Niece and All the Other Newly Minted Black Women Assistant Professors on the Eve of My Promotion to Full Professor | Lisa B. Thompson Provocation 3: “an open letter to the school resource officer who almost shot me in my class” and “the surprising thing” | Matthew E. Henry Part 4: Into the Cypher Th/Inking in Black: Notes on Teaching Creative Writing | Nelly Rosario Black Fugitive Pedagogies | Aricka Foreman Note-to-Self, to My Sister Hennessy: Collecting Subjects in Black Queer Feminist Pedagogy | Mecca Jamilah Sullivan What the Body Knows: A Theatrical Jazz–Inflected Pedagogy | Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Sharon Bridgforth young neesha or, a radical idea that black children should not be given white paper to create art that reflects themselves (or anything) | Avery R. Young Provocation 4: Excerpts from Too Fly on the Wall: Negrotesque Workshop Tactics for Black Study | Douglas Kearney Appendix A: So You Wanna Get a Black Education: A Primer Appendix B: The Infiniphonic B Sides

Editorial Reviews

For those who know the perils of teaching Black literature while living Black, the essays assembled in Teaching Black are the balm in Gilead. With honesty, humility, and humor, these authors put their bodies on the line to reflect upon what it means to privilege Black texts—indeed Black life—in an anti-Black world. Every teacher should read this book.” —E. Patrick Johnson, Northwestern University

“Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown’s Teaching Black is an invitation to a collaborative community gathering on the page, a calling forth of lineage, engagement, and conversation with Black literature and culture. A space of transformative witness for the skill, care, and love that Black educators bring into the classroom and the space that they create for their students to listen and honor the multiplicities of experience, thought, song, and form of Black literature.” —Ching-In Chen, University of Washington

From the Publisher