Richard Wright, Native Son, and the Beinecke

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Library is pleased to announce a new podcast: Richard Wright, Native Son, and the Beinecke: Being Brought to My Senses. Jonathan Holloway, Yale Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies recounts visiting the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in his first month of graduate school and the transformative experience that grew out of his surprise encounter with Richard Wright’s landmark text, Native Son. (7:27)

You can listen to and download this podcast free via the Beinecke’s Blogs & Podcasts page and through Yale’s iTunesU web site.

Information about the Richard Wright Papers at the Beinecke Library and related collections can be found online by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database. Images from the archive are available through the Beinecke’s Digital Library.

Historian Jonathan Holloway is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941, the editor of Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership, and the co-editor of the anthology, Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century. He is a professor of History at Yale University and in 2005 he became the eleventh master of Calhoun College, one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges.

Images: Photograph of Richard Wright;page from manuscript draft of Wright’s of Native Son.

A Celebration of New Writing

Young African American Poets: A Celebration of New Writing
Poetry Readings by Evie Shockly, Douglas Kearney,
and Amaud Jamal Johnson

Tuesday, October 28, 4pm
Slifka Center , 80 Wall Street (NOTE: this event will not take place at Beinecke Library)
Co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature
Reading Series and New Ideas in African American Studies
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Evie Shockley is the author of a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and the collection a half-red sea (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Fascicle, Hambone, HOW2, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and teacher. His work has appeared in Callaloo, jubilat, Ninth Letter, and other journals. His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, Some, was published in October 2006. Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Daily, From the Fishouse, and other journals. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book, Red Summer, was the winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press.