Author: Scott LaClaire

1. Introduction

By Gerald Maa
From the Summer 2021 Issue

In 1900 the world’s fair was held in Paris. Like world’s fairs before it, the 1900 Paris Exposition celebrated technological innovation within the context of a world built of nations, projecting an air of unbridled optimism through a conviction of …

Gerald Maa

Gerald Maa is a writer, translator, and editor based in Athens, GA.  His poetry and translations have appeared in places such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China (Copper Canyon, 2011).  His essays have appeared in places such as Criticism, Studies in Romanticism, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia, 2015), and The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago, 2015).  Work from his practice of activated writing have been performed and mounted in Los Angeles, New York, and Sweden.  In 2010, he founded The Asian American Literary Review with Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, where he served as editor-in-chief until starting his job at The Georgia Review in August 2019.

 

2. Using 120-Year-Old Tools to Document Black Life in Georgia

By Janeria Easley
From the Summer 2021 Issue

W. E. B. Du Bois was a leader in establishing the field of American sociology. He deployed empiricism, often triangulating various methods to advance our sociological understanding in ways that were unheard of in the United States at that time …

Janeria Easley

Janeria Easley is an assistant professor of African American studies at Emory University. Dr. Easley is trained as a sociologist and a demographer. She studies neighborhoods, wealth, and other racialized barriers to economic well-being.

3. From “Of the Sons of Master and Man”

By W. E. B. Du Bois
From the Summer 2021 Issue

In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in universal …

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to be awarded a Harvard PhD. He spent nearly a quarter century on the faculty of Atlanta University as professor of history and sociology (1897–1910) and head of the sociology department (1934–1944). Du Bois’ writings and his intellectual guidance as teacher, researcher, and editor at Atlanta University contributed immensely to its reputation as a preeminent resource for the study of race in America. In 1903 he published his now-classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, named as one of the Modern Library’s one hundred most influential works of the twentieth century. Du Bois spent twenty-three years as editor of Crisis, a publication of the NAACP—an organization he helped found. During his second span at Atlanta University he became the first editor-in-chief of Phylon, the University’s scholarly review of race and culture, to which he was also an ardent and frequent contributor. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)

4. selections from “The Exhibit of American Negroes” for the 1900 Paris Exposition

By W. E. B. Du Bois
From the Summer 2021 Issue

In 1900 the world’s fair was held in Paris. Like world’s fairs before it, the 1900 Paris Exposition celebrated technological innovation within the context of a world built of nations, projecting an air of unbridled optimism through a conviction of …

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to be awarded a Harvard PhD. He spent nearly a quarter century on the faculty of Atlanta University as professor of history and sociology (1897–1910) and head of the sociology department (1934–1944). Du Bois’ writings and his intellectual guidance as teacher, researcher, and editor at Atlanta University contributed immensely to its reputation as a preeminent resource for the study of race in America. In 1903 he published his now-classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, named as one of the Modern Library’s one hundred most influential works of the twentieth century. Du Bois spent twenty-three years as editor of Crisis, a publication of the NAACP—an organization he helped found. During his second span at Atlanta University he became the first editor-in-chief of Phylon, the University’s scholarly review of race and culture, to which he was also an ardent and frequent contributor. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)

5. spell to trace a rainbow to its apogee

By Keith S. Wilson
From the Summer 2021 Issue

I will say it plainly: in America, the ostensible pursuit of objectivity has historically served to silence Black voices. This is true in the field of journalism, in every hall of the justice system, and even in each of the …

Keith S. Wilson

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian poet and a Cave Canem fellow. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Wilson’s first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2019.

6. From “Of the Black Belt”

By W. E. B. Du Bois
From the Summer 2021 Issue

Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; …

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to be awarded a Harvard PhD. He spent nearly a quarter century on the faculty of Atlanta University as professor of history and sociology (1897–1910) and head of the sociology department (1934–1944). Du Bois’ writings and his intellectual guidance as teacher, researcher, and editor at Atlanta University contributed immensely to its reputation as a preeminent resource for the study of race in America. In 1903 he published his now-classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, named as one of the Modern Library’s one hundred most influential works of the twentieth century. Du Bois spent twenty-three years as editor of Crisis, a publication of the NAACP—an organization he helped found. During his second span at Atlanta University he became the first editor-in-chief of Phylon, the University’s scholarly review of race and culture, to which he was also an ardent and frequent contributor. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)

7. THE AXIS OF DISPOSSESSION, fig 2.

By Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
From the Summer 2021 Issue

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

 

Addendum

One of the most valuable things I learned studying with Ruth Ellen Kocher was the concept of “Mastery of Form/Deformation of Mastery,” coined by scholar Houston Baker to describe the aesthetics of Black …

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017) received a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, she has published in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is working on a poetry and essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles.

8. The After-Thought

By W. E. B. Du Bois
From the Summer 2021 Issue

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears …

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to be awarded a Harvard PhD. He spent nearly a quarter century on the faculty of Atlanta University as professor of history and sociology (1897–1910) and head of the sociology department (1934–1944). Du Bois’ writings and his intellectual guidance as teacher, researcher, and editor at Atlanta University contributed immensely to its reputation as a preeminent resource for the study of race in America. In 1903 he published his now-classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, named as one of the Modern Library’s one hundred most influential works of the twentieth century. Du Bois spent twenty-three years as editor of Crisis, a publication of the NAACP—an organization he helped found. During his second span at Atlanta University he became the first editor-in-chief of Phylon, the University’s scholarly review of race and culture, to which he was also an ardent and frequent contributor. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)

on A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape by W. Ralph Eubanks

By KaToya Ellis Fleming
From the Summer 2021 Issue

“Daddy, what’s Mississippi like?” In the prologue to his 2003 memoir Ever Is a Long Time, author W. Ralph Eubanks recounts this innocent, yet surprisingly complicated question posed to him by his young son one night during a bedtime conversation. …

KaToya Ellis Fleming

KaToya Ellis Fleming is an assistant professor of publishing arts at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington and editor at Lookout Books. She was previously in residence in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the 2019–20 Oxford American Jeff Baskin Writers Fellow. She holds a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia and is currently at work on “Finding Frank,” a bibliomemoir. Her work focuses on race and culture in the American South and has appeared in Oxford American, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.