Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Published Works: A Bibliography in Progress

We offer here a comprehensive bibliography of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s primary works known to have appeared in print. Our listing begins with the four collections of her personal, belletristic, and non-belletristic writing produced by Akasha (Gloria) Hull, R. Ora Williams, and Eugene Metcalf in the 1970s and 1980s. It then presents, by genre, additional pieces published by Dunbar-Nelson in her lifetime. Some of this latter work is still accessible through libraries and digital archives. However, several of the newspapers and journals in which she published were never archived, and copies of certain works will only be available in the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers at University of Delaware’s Special Collections Library.¹

To compile this listing we drew upon information provided in Williams’s 1976 bibliography and the Special Collections catalog at University of Delaware, as well as our own research. However, Dunbar-Nelson’s personal records, and especially the “itineraries” she kept— documentation of pieces accepted, rejected, and under review for publication²— indicate that more of her writing appeared in print than was previously believed. The hunt for such works is complicated by the fact that the writer published under several different versions of her name over the course of her career (we have provided the variants she used for individual items wherever possible). Dunbar-Nelson may have also published pseudonymously. Her archive reveals that she submitted work under at least three aliases: Adele Morris, Monroe Wright, and Al Dane. But whether she ever published using one of these pseudonyms, or a different one, has yet to be determined. More discoveries may well lie ahead.