Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Contributors

{ 199 } CONTRIBUTORS Ed Folsom is the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, codirector of The Walt Whitman Archive, and the author or editor of five books on Whitman. His essays on American poetry have appeared in numerous journals and books, including American Literature and The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. His most recent book, coauthored with Kenneth Price, is Re-­ scripting Walt Whitman. Christopher Freeburg is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­ Champaign, specializing in American and African American literature and culture. He has recently published Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-­ Century America, and he is currently revising his new book manuscript, “Black Writers and the Unhistoric Life of Race.” He is also in the early stages of composing an intellectual biography on James Baldwin and the origins of the New World. Amina Gautier is an assistant professor at DePaul University in Chicago , Illinois, where she teaches both creative writing and literary criticism . She has published dozens of short stories, and her first collection, At-­Risk, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. George B. Hutchinson is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture and professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, and In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, which won the Christian Gauss Award. He also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance and coedited with John K. Young Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850. He is currently writing a book on American literature and culture in the 1940s, for which he held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011–12. June Jordan was a poet, activist, journalist, essayist, and teacher who used her platform as a writer to champion the civil rights, feminist, and LGBT movements, among other progressive causes. As a writer, she published more than twenty-­ five works, including Who Look at Me, Some { 200 } Contributors Changes, Living Room, and Talking Back to God. Appointed professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988, she founded the Poetry for the People program. Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of a book of poems, The Ground; a book of criticism, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness; and the first translation from Catalan into English of Salvador Espriu’s collection of short stories Adriana in the Grotesque Labyrinth. Currently he is an associate professor of English at Stony Brook as well as director of the Poetry Center. Matt Sandler teaches in the Robert Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Self-­ Help Poetics: Genealogies of an American Vernacular.” His work has appeared in the African American Review, Atlantic Studies, and Callaloo. Natasha Trethewey is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. She is the author of four volumes of poetry: Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard (winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize), and Thrall. She is currently the United States Poet Laureate. Jacob Wilkenfeld is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century literatures of the Americas. His dissertation explores inter-­ American imaginaries in nineteenth-­ century Brazilian and US American literature, particularly in the work of Walt Whitman and Sousândrade. He has published essays in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and The Limits of Literary Translation: Expanding Frontiers in Iberian Languages. Ivy G. Wilson is associate professor of English and director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses on the comparative literature of the black diaspora and US literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. In addition to publishing edited volumes on James M. Whitfield and Albery A. Whitman, he has recently published Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics. ...