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  • Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.:In Memoriam
  • A Yęmisi Jimoh (bio) and Angelo Rich Robinson (bio)

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Color Plate 1.

Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., with Anne Herrington and Esther Terry, University of Massachusetts Amherst English Department's Annual Awards Night, May 2002.

Colleague, scholar, teacher, friend, editor, mentor: these are just a few of the roles the writers of the personal reflection essays—and a few of the scholarly article contributors—in this special issue of MELUS use to discuss their relationships to Joe Skerrett. In those roles, he is further described as kind, wise, gentlemanly, [End Page 6] loyal, matter-of-fact, and dedicated to multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. As the photograph, taken May 2002 with Anne Herrington of the Department of English and Esther Terry of the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, portrays (see color plate 1), Joe was beloved by his academic family. For those who knew Joe Skerrett away from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, his love of fine food, gardening, travel, and opera also presented opportunities for fond memories. A quiet demeanor belied a complexity that became demonstrably apparent once Joe spoke.

The journey that brought Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. to the New England community in Western Massachusetts, where he resided and contributed substantially as a professor and scholar, began in Brooklyn, New York, on 23 June 1943. The third of four children, Joe received an undergraduate education at St. Francis College, where in 1964 he earned a bachelor's degree. He received a master's degree in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins University in 1965 and then pursued doctoral studies at Yale University, where, in 1975, he earned a PhD in twentieth-century African American literature. In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, St. Francis College.

Joe's career in higher education began in 1973 in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While he took a brief detour into other areas of education, Joe Skerrett ultimately returned home to the professoriate, where he remained until retiring from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009 as emeritus professor. Throughout his career, Joe taught courses in African American and multi-ethnic literatures and American studies. He directed the American Studies Program, housed in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in 1996 was the recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Multiculturalism from the university, recognizing his contributions to diversity on the campus. Longtime members of MELUS know that Joe was president of MELUS, serving from 1984 to '86, and readers of the journal, both inside and outside the MELUS Society, knew Skerrett as editor of MELUS for twelve years. In 2000, he received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Distinguished Editor Award.

As a scholar, Joe Skerrett emphasized the significance of both race and ethnicity as central to scholarship on multi-ethnic literatures and situated multi-ethnic literatures at the center of the literature of the United States. He also located African American literature prominently in multi-ethnic literary studies. This approach is reflected in his publications. The important and well-received anthology, Literature, Race, and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities (2001, 2002), exemplifies Skerrett's scholarly engagement on these issues. He also coedited two collections: Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures (1996) and Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures (1994). He was a frequent participant on national and international scholarly panels, where his insightful perspectives on multi-ethnic [End Page 7] literatures brought important dimensions to the discussion, and he organized well-received symposia on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, including on the writer James Purdy, in whom Joe Skerrett had a deep interest, and, in collaboration with the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, on the nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Joe completed his journey in Belchertown, Massachusetts, where he passed away in his home on 25 July 2015. In the year following his passing, contributors to Callaloo 39.1 (2016), an announcement in The...

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