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  • Editor’s Notes
  • Charles Henry Rowell

The offices of Callaloo at the University of Virginia have been abuzz with work on a number of projects for the last three years, only one of which is the quarterly editing and production of the journal itself. These projects depend on financial support from private and public agencies and are designed to advertise and promote Callaloo and its special issues. Like the journal itself, these projects are public events which not only work for the good of the general American public but also for the journal’s contributors and the writing communities within which they are situated. Through these projects, not a few writers have been afforded the opportunity to speak and read at sites where they have never before had the privilege of making an intimate visit. In addition to identifying and nurturing potential writers as well as supporting and promoting new writers, these projects have helped to expand and develop the audience for 20th-century American literature in general and African-American literature in particular. We have no doubt that these Callaloo-derived projects of the past three years have performed services which our supporters affirm and applaud.

In 1997, we began the second stage of planning and initial coordination of our largest project, “Writing the Self and the Community: The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops for Historically Black Institutions,” an outreach program coordinated by Kendra Hamilton during its first two years and by Colette Dabney, Administrative Assistant, and Ginger Thornton, Managing Editor, in the fall semester of 1999. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops in many ways return the journal to its roots, the writing workshops which initiated its first issue nearly 25 years ago. (With the help of a number of friends in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I founded the journal and edited and published its first issue during the fall of 1976 as the result of a creative writing workshop we conducted on the Baton Rouge campus of Southern University.) “Writing the Self and the Community” is designed to identify, encourage, and nurture potential creative writers (poets, fiction writers, essayists, and others) who are currently studying at historically black colleges and universities in the U.S. American South. The Workshops have provided students in those institutions one week of direct study with contemporary African-American writers, most of whom are award-winning poets and fiction writers who teach courses in creative writing at predominantly white institutions. This project has also provided students at historically black institutions the privilege of receiving close readings and critiques of their work from diverse professional writers. Lucille Clifton, Percival Everett, Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, John Edgar Wideman, Sharan Strange, Gloria Naylor, Yusef Komunyakaa, Helen Elaine Lee, Toi Derricotte, Reginald McKnight, and Harryette Mullen—these are some of the writers who have participated in this project.

In its three-year history, “Writing the Self and the Community” has visited Morehouse College, Fisk University, Morgan State University, Spelman College, [End Page vii] North Carolina Central University, and Xavier University; and, through readings and week-long workshops at these sites, we have continued to dedicate ourselves to the four-fold purpose of the project: 1) to re-establish an all-but-severed historical link between this generation’s most gifted African-American writers and the schools that once would have nurtured and sheltered their talents; 2) to foster and encourage a new generation of African-American writers through workshops that would otherwise be unavailable to them; 3) to broaden the audience for contemporary African-American literature in Southern communities, particularly black Southern communities; and 4) to promote and market Callaloo, particularly in the Southern region of the United States. The positive reception of this project and the numerous continuing requests for our return from students and faculty suggest that The Workshops help to fulfill, however briefly, some of the collective academic needs historically black colleges and universities face.

During the spring and summer of 1998, we began at a variety of locations to mount a series of programs—public readings and symposia, literary activities—which extend the audience for modern and contemporary writing in the...

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