Description
OBSIDIAN’S HEIRLOOM: PRESERVING HBCU FUTURES celebrates the brilliance and legacy of US-based, historically Black colleges and universities
OBSIDIAN’S HEIRLOOM: PRESERVING HBCU FUTURES, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas with associate editors Danielle L. Littlefield & Danian Darrell Jerry, celebrates the brilliance and legacy of US-based, historically Black colleges and universities.
Since the Civil War, HBCUs and land-grant colleges have sustained spaces that nurture and value the creative, intellectual, and economic growth of Black students from throughout the diaspora, allowing some of the most celebrated artists, entrepreneurs, educators, civic leaders, physicians, and innovators to rise. This special issue recognizes that these historic institutions produce some of the most gifted Black artists and thinkers contributing to world thought today. HEIRLOOM includes an interview with Jericho Brown, visual art from Black Kirby (Stacey Robinson & John Jennings), reflections on the founding of Planet Deep South, and work by Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III), Douglas Kearney, Monifa Love, Tony Medina, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, and Andrea Walls.
Magazine. Fiction. Poetry. Literary Criticism. Art. African & African American Studies.
Author Bio
Duriel E. Harris is a poet, performer, and sound artist. She is author of three print volumes of poetry, including her most recent, NO DICTIONARY OF A LIVING TONGUE (Nightboat, 2017), DRAG (Elixir Press, 2003) and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include her one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, as well as Speleology (2011), a video collaboration with artist Scott Rankin. Cofounder of the avant garde poetry/performance trio The Black Took Collective, Harris is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University and the editor of OBSIDIAN: LITERATURE & ARTS IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA (Downstate Legacies, 2019).
Sheree Renée Thomas is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems. She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Her speculative stories and poems appear in Apex Magazine, Harvard's Transition, Smith's Meridians, NYU's Black Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, ESSENCE, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Revise the Psalm: Writers Celebrate the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Specualtive Poetry, An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassiafiables, Jalada Afrofuture(s), Afrofuturo(s), Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delaney, Inks Crawl, Memphis Noir, Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers, and the anthology, Sycorax's Daughters. Based in Memphis, Thomas is Associate Editor of OBSIDIAN: LITERATURE & ARTS IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA (Downstate Legacies, 2019),
Author City: USA