Abstract

Abstract:

In 1973, Margaret Walker transformed Phillis Wheatley into the rebirth of Black women’s poetry via an eponymous poetry festival, an extension of a praxis she had been refining in her 1966 novel Jubilee since its inception in 1934. By understanding Phillis’s story to be as celebratory as the passed-down stories of Margaret’s maternal ancestors in Jubilee, Margaret empowered an entire generation of Black women poets, including herself, to frame Black feminist literature as a collective praxis of cross-generational time travel. Margaret’s work demonstrated that Black women’s acts of remembrance and gratitude are songs of liberation worthy of their own praise.

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