Local Americanists: Tess Chakkalakal on Charles W. Chesnutt
Local Americanists: Tess Chakkalakal on Charles W. Chesnutt
Please join us for a Local Americanists during which Professor Tess Chakkalakal will discuss her recently published book, A Matter of Complexion: The Life & Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt (St. Martin's Press, 2025).
If you are interested in attending, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong for the Zoom link.
About the Speaker:
Tess Chakkalakal [pronounced “Chah-KAHL-ickle”] has published widely on nineteenth-century African American and American literature. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Illinois, 2011) which earned the Robert K. Martin Prize for best book on American literature and "a must read" title by Choice. She is co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (Georgia, 2013). She is also co-editor of Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition (West Virginia Press, 2022).
Her new book, A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt is available now from St. Martin’s Press, or wherever you buy books. She is at work, with her co-host Brock Clarke on Season 2 of their award-winning podcast series Dead Writers and a new edition of Chesnutt’s Journals forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Professor Chakkalakal serves on the Board of Directors of the Stowe Center in Hartford, CT and The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, ME.
About the Book:
A biography of Charles Chesnutt, one of the first American authors to write for both Black and white readers.
In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.
Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Please join us for a Local Americanists during which Professor Tess Chakkalakal will discuss her recently published book, A Matter of Complexion: The Life & Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt (St. Martin's Press, 2025).
If you are interested in attending, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong for the Zoom link.
About the Speaker:
Tess Chakkalakal [pronounced “Chah-KAHL-ickle”] has published widely on nineteenth-century African American and American literature. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Illinois, 2011) which earned the Robert K. Martin Prize for best book on American literature and "a must read" title by Choice. She is co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (Georgia, 2013). She is also co-editor of Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition (West Virginia Press, 2022).
Her new book, A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt is available now from St. Martin’s Press, or wherever you buy books. She is at work, with her co-host Brock Clarke on Season 2 of their award-winning podcast series Dead Writers and a new edition of Chesnutt’s Journals forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Professor Chakkalakal serves on the Board of Directors of the Stowe Center in Hartford, CT and The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, ME.
About the Book:
A biography of Charles Chesnutt, one of the first American authors to write for both Black and white readers.
In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.
Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.
RSVP
To attend, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong.