African American

Celebrating 10 Years of “Night’s Dancer” by Yaël Tamar Lewin

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September 13, 2021, marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, by dance scholar Yaël Tamar Lewin, referred to as a “must-read” by Charmaine Warren in her Amsterdam News review. It chronicles the life of an extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet—the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera.

The book opens with Collins’s unfinished memoir, which gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo—based on Collins’s refusal to whiten her face. Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins’s story, drawing on extensive research and interviews to explore Collins’s development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, giving us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit in an era in which racial bias prevailed. The book contains 65 illustrations, including 49 photographs as well as 16 color plates of Collins and her visual artwork.

Winner of the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, from the Arts Club of Washington, Night’s Dancer reveals that Collins’s brilliant performances transformed how African-American dancers were perceived in the world of ballet, making way for future ballet dancers of color. The 70th anniversary of her historic debut at the Metropolitan Opera will be celebrated on November 13, 2021.

Yaël Tamar Lewin is a dance historian, writer, and dancer living in New York City.

Praise for Night’s Dancer

“Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins is an enthralling read. It reinforces Collins’s struggle, personal strength and ultimate success. While following her dreams with endless energy, she leapt over boundaries.”
—Karen Barr, Dance International

“Much of Collins’s career is lost in the gaps of performance history, and Lewin has done wonders to restore to the record the work of this pioneering woman, as well as printing Collins’s forty-odd pages of reminiscences for the first time… Night’s Dancer is a fine contribution both to dance history and the history of segregation in the United States.”
—Judith Flanders, Times Literary Supplement

“With Night’s Dancer, Lewin has produced a major work that continues to correct the absence of historical writing on African Americans in ballet and modern dance. The author incorporates Collins’s own writings, intimate details from the artist’s life, and rich contextual material to create a work that is emotionally touching and incredibly informative.”
—John O. Perpener III, author of African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

“Blessed with extraordinary gifts for dance and painting, Janet Collins broke barriers as the first African-American prima ballerina at the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera. Her life’s journey is inspirational. History should recognize her as one of its pioneers. Janet Collins was truly one of earth’s angels.”
—Arthur Mitchell, co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

“Psychologists, sociologists, historians, painters, dancers, choreographers—here is your book! This is a careful, objective, revealing study of a complex and enigmatic person. Collins was richly blessed with creative talents and deeply drawn to a spiritual life. Night’s Dancer explores her struggle to fulfill and be fulfilled. A scholarly, beautiful, important work, and long overdue.”
—Raven Wilkinson, first African-American dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo

“Public Figures” Revisited

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The topic of monuments and memorialization of historical figures has been a point of contention in the United States. We recall the removal of confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, resulting in retaliation from violent white supremacist groups. In more recent news, the removal of similar statues has swept the nation after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells. As protests against police brutality occur in states across the nation, calls for the removal of statues that stand as symbols of racism and oppression have increased. Some monuments, such as one of Christopher Columbus in Boston and Thomas Jefferson in Portland, have been physically removed by frustrated people demanding a more accurate recognition of American history.

Many of these Civil War-related statues were erected long after the war, in the early 20th century. This fact might leave one to ponder, what was the intention of honoring Confederate military leaders in the early 20th century?

Jena Osman’s book Public Figures examines the monuments and statues of Philadelphia, pondering each statue’s literal “view” on the city as well as the embedded history within their creation and placement. As the book progresses, including photographs of various figures, the common theme remains of militarism and pride in the state. Regardless of the historical context of a statue, whether it be a Civil War soldier or a replica of a classical Greek statue, weaponry including guns, swords, spears, and grenades are attached to the hands and arms of these iron men. Many are dressed in military uniform, differentiating them from the civilian life of the passersby.

Osman ponders what we do and do not notice as we move about our lives. Does our oblivious walk past such statues parallel our nation’s ability to ignore the deadly work of state-sanctioned violence and indicate an implicit acceptance of our country’s racist history? What kind of message do statues symbolizing slave owners and colonizers send to communities of color? And why must these communities accept these statues looming over their daily lives?

When you next find yourself in a public space, take a look around at the monuments and art placed there. Ponder what the intended message is.

To learn more about Public Figures, check out our Reader’s Companion. Teachers might find these classroom exercises useful, including a research project for students to investigate their local “public figures.”

 

 

Meet Priscilla Page, dramaturg who worked with Joy Harjo!

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Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page in conversation at Yale University, March 2019.

Priscilla Page was co-editor and contributor to Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and A Circle of Responses. The play was inspired by Harjo’s desire to see Native Americans accurately depicted on the stage, in the face of inaccurate contemporary depictions found in the likes of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Cry, Trojans!, in addition other recent plays. As Mary Kathryn Nagle points out in her introductory essay: “In contrast to the majority of contemporary Native representation onstage, the Native protagonist of Wings does not grunt incoherent sounds, nor does she portray the loss of her Muscogee ancestral homelands as a joke in a modern day rock musical.”

Priscilla Page is a writer, dramaturg, senior lecturer in the Department of Theater and coordinator for the Multicultural Theater Certificate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a member of the Latino Theater Commons and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). She served as the program curator at New WORLD Theater and managed the Asian American Women Playwrights Archive for five years.

Page’s dramaturgy works include My Bronx, written and performed by Terry Jenoure, sash & trim, written and performed by Djola Branner and directed by award winning actress Laurie Carlos, Changing the Air, written and directed by Ingrid Askew, and Lydia on the Top Floor, also written and performed by Terry Jenoure and directed by Linda McInerney. Page also contributed to widely published playwright Migdalia Cruz’s essay “My World Made Real,” a part of Cruz’s anthology, El Grito Del Bronx. She earned her BA at California State University Hayward, and her MFA in dramaturgy at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Question & Answer with Priscilla Page

Q Tell us about what led you to become a dramaturg?

A I have always loved theater and performance. I took dance classes with my cousins when I was really young and then I was in the choir and in plays in high school. Like many young people, I wanted to move to New York and become an actor. I had big dreams for a while. In college, I chose to have a child and then redirected my path in life. I finished college with an emphasis on costume design and an interest in dramaturgy. Right after college, I was able to work as an intern as dramaturg at UC Santa Barbara where my love for theater research continued to grow. That experience led me to study dramaturgy at UMASS Amherst where I earned my MFA in 2002. There are many facets to dramaturgy and dramaturgs perform a number of different functions that include research, translation, education, audience engagement, and new play development. As a dramaturg, I am most interested in working with writers (playwrights and poets) on new plays/performance texts. Laurie Carlos, my mentor and art-mother, helped forge what is known as the jazz aesthetics in theater and I see her influence on my work clearly. I appreciate theater that blends forms and that pushes creative and political boundaries. Joy’s play does these things and shows the readers a path toward self-actualization and healing.

Q  What do you envision, for the future of Indigenous Theater and Indigenous Performance?

A I envision respect, understanding, and resources. We chose to place Mary Kathryn Nagle’s essay first in the book because she lays out such a clear statement about the absence AND the distortions of Native American people on the American stage that is both historical and ongoing. Native American artists have rich and complex stories to tell. We need audiences to listen and we need resources to cultivate new voices and spaces for Native American writers and performers.

Q How did you come to work on Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, a book about Indigenous Theater?

A I met Joy in 2003 when she performed as part of the Global Women’s History Project at Westfield State College. My dear friend and incredible poet Magdalena Gomez also participated in that event and told me about it. I have loved Joy’s poetry since I first read it as a young woman in college in California in the 1990s. At the time that Joy and I met, I was having a hard time emotionally because my Aunt Linda had passed away and recently. It was sudden and it deeply affected my mother. I wasn’t able to travel home and felt very sad and lonely. I had never seen pictures of Joy but I knew many of her poems: “She Had Some Horses”, “Remember”, “Woman Hanging From the 13th Floor Window”. I expected to be moved by hearing her but what was totally unexpected was how I felt when I saw her. She looks just like my Aunt Linda. I ended up sitting in the back of the room and weeping through the entire reading. When it was over, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the space. In fact, I moved closer to the stage without really wanting to talk to Joy. I only wanted to be close to her as I grieved. I am sure she sensed that something was going on with me because I think I ended up being the only person in the auditorium. I vividly recall Joy sitting next to me and starting a conversation with me. I told her that she looked like my aunt and she simply said, “Tell me about her.” I shared with her that I knew a little about my family’s heritage as Native Americans but that my mom and her siblings were virtually silent about that part of themselves. We come from a very small tribe that endured incredible violence in Northern California, the Wiyot Tribe. Joy knew of this tribe and their history. She had even done work with them and visited their land. I had a copy of her poem “Remember” with me and I asked her to sign it. She wrote, “I hope this poem helps you find your people.”

I share part of this story in the book and with you now because it did help me continue to ask questions and do research; it’s a journey that I am still taking. I also learned from Joy and through my research that my family’s silence was really a form of self-preservation. White settlers intended to completely wipe them out and enacted a series massacres with the most horrific one taking place on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay on February 26, 1860. After that the surviving members went underground, joining other tribes nearby or inter-marrying. My grandmother Lila Keysner was born in 1910 and the word “half-breed” is listed on her birth certificate. Her grandparents would have lived during the time of the massacres. The only detail that I really know is that she lived on a reservation until she married my grandfather Raymond Chavarin, a Mexican man. They lived in Oakland, CA, and had nine children together.

After meeting Joy in 2003, I attended the reading of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light at the Public Theater in 2009. I remember really loving the idea of telling the story of Redbird with poetry and music. It’s the perfect form for Joy because she has led bands over the years and because she often plays her saxophone at her poetry readings. In 2011, I was able to work with my colleague Professor Laura Furlan at UMASS Amherst and we hosted Joy and Larry Mitchell for a short residency that included a performance, a workshop version of “Wings” and the radio interview that I conducted with Joy and Ron Welburn, a leading figure in Native Studies and an expert on jazz. I included parts of that interview in my essay in the book as well. It was after that residency that Joy asked me to work with her on the book project. It actually took us a while and there were some starts and stops with shape of the book and the contributors. I am very happy that we worked with Mary Kathryn Nagle who wrote a strong and compelling essay and that I was able to interview both Randy Reinholz, a Native theater director and producer who I know and admire as well as Rolland Meinholtz who was very generous with his time and his recollections. And the book is stunning! I love the design of it and the inclusion of the production photos.

Photos from a production of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.
(Click on the photos to expand.)

Announcing “Letters from Amherst”

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Entertaining and informative letters written from 1984 to 1991

In these personal and pointed letters written between 1984 and 1991, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer Samuel Delany comments on literature, art, politics, aging, academia, his family’s history in Harlem, and black and white social life in another century. He details a visit from science fiction writer and critic Judith Merrill and reflects on his colleague and former student Octavia E. Butler.

Samuel R. Delany is a science fiction author and a retired professor at Temple University. After winning four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Visit samueldelany.com for more author news.

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica. She is the author of six novels and numerous short stories. She has received the Campbell and Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award for her contributions to science fiction and fantasy. Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

“Letters from Amherst gives readers insight into the personal and professional life and aesthetic assessments of the author, Samuel R. Delany, one of the most important literary figures of our time.”—Nisi Shawl, author of the Nebula Award Finalist novel Everfair, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award-winning story collection Filter House

“Letters from Amherst is significant and important…Delany provides unseen glimpses into his important familial lineages, personal friendship and partnership, his assessment of universities and their politics, and a general joy in anything that has to do with intellectual culture.” —L.H. Stallings, author of Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

June 4, 2019
160 pp., 9 x 6″
Paperback, $17.95 9780819578518
Cloth, $45.00 9780819578204

The Age of Phillis, forthcoming from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce we have secured the world rights to The Age of Phillis, a new volume of poetry by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who is represented by Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company.

The Age of Phillis is the result of over a decade of research and contemplation by Jeffers. She draws on historical sources to take readers into the world of Phillis Wheatley, the first black American woman to publish a book. Wheatley published a volume of poetry entitled Poems of Various Subjects, Religion, and Morals on September 1, 1773. Jeffers imagines Wheatley’s thoughts as she navigates life as an intellectual, as an enslaved person, as an observant poet, and as a woman of African descent—eventually a freed woman, and wife, whose life would be cut short by poverty and illness.

Wesleyan plans for for a Spring 2020 publication date.

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of four previous books of poetry including The Glory Gets, published by Wesleyan University Press in May 2015. Her other books are: The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000)—selected by Lucille Clifton for the Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan, 2003), and Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois, 2007).

Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, African American Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Obsidian III, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and has been anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2011) and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Georgia, 2009). Her critical writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. Jeffers has received numerous awards and honors, including a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, a lifetime achievement honor, and an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers. For her research on Phillis Wheatley, Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history and culture, to which fourteen US presidents have elected. She is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

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Three Wesleyan University Press Authors Receive 2019 Guggenheim Fellowships

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Congratulations to three Wesleyan University Press authors who have been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation chose 168 recipients from 30,000 applicants from the United States and Canada. Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Winners from the Press include:

Ann Cooper Albright

Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. She is the author of Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Dance Studies.

Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She is the author of Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He is the author of In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018. He is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

 

 

 

Announcing “In the Language of My Captor” now available in paperback!

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Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry

“[McCrae’s] language remains as stark as the perdurable, terrible history it contains—a history that is not over yet.”
—Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection, In the Language of My Captor, now available in paper, is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. In it, historical persona poemsand a prose memoir address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, and he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.

Shane McCrae is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Animal Too Big to Kill, Mule, Forgiveness Forgiveness, and Blood.

April 2, 2019
108 pp., 9 x 6″
Paperback, $14.95 9780819577122
Cloth, $24.95 9780819577115

A Celebration of Lorenzo Thomas

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In late October a celebration of the late poet Lorenzo Thomas was organized at the Poetry Project on St. Marks.The event featured readings of his work by A.L. Nielsen, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Tracie Morris, and other contemporary poets in celebration of Thomas’ legacy and forthcoming poetry collection, The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Laura Vrana.

Afro-Caribbean poet Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama in 1944 and relocated to Queens, New York, in 1948. Recognized for his contributions to the Umbra workshop and the proceeding Black Arts Movement of Harlem, he published ten collections of poetry in his lifetime, including Chances Are Few (1979), The Bathers (1981), and Dancing on Main Street (2004). He was the editor of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (2000), which received the honor of Choice Outstanding Academic Book for the year. After graduating from Queens College in 1971, Thomas served in the United States’ Navy (1971–1973) and later became a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, in 1984. He passed away in 2005, in Houston.

Recordings from the event can be found on YouTube.
Part I
Part II

Evie Shockley honored with Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

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Congratulations to Evie Shockley!

Her book, semiautomatic, is the winner of the 2018 Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award for Poetry.
In the words of the judges: “Despite the ugliness of the violence around us, she has written a collection of poems that both chronicles it and decries it, all while offering us the beauty of her lines.”

More about the awards, from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation:

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation announced the winners and finalists of the 2018 Legacy Awards and paid tribute to two pioneers in the Black literary community: Poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, best known for For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf; and Charles Henry Rowell, long-time editor and creator of the literary journal Callaloo.

Marita Golden, co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, presented the North Star Award—the foundation’s highest honor for career accomplishment and inspiration to the writing community to Dr. Shange; due to health issues, Dr. Shange was unable to attend, but her sister, playwright Ifa Bayeza accepted the award. Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey presented Dr. Rowell with the Madam C.J. Walker award in recognition of his life-long dedication to uplifting the Black cultural experience.

More than 200 literary stars, readers and representatives of the publishing industry, media, arts, politics, and academia attended the event on Friday, October 19 in Washington, DC. Award-winning journalist Derek McGinty served as Master of Ceremony and Khadijah Ali-Coleman, playwright, poet and singer/songwriter, delivered a musical tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, one of the foundation’s namesakes. The highlight of the evening was the naming of the winners of the juried awards for books by Black authors published in 2017 in the categories of debut novel, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Read more about the Hurston/Wright Foundation.