Andrea Lee, Mary Helen Washington, Shaun Myers: In Conversation
Andrea Lee, Mary Helen Washington, Shaun Myers: In Conversation
Join a conversation between Andrea Lee, Mary Helen Washington (University of Maryland), and Shaun Myers (University of Pittsburgh).
Co-sponsored by the Africana/Black Studies Colloquium and the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies.
Politics & Prose joins as the promoted bookseller for this event. Orders from P&P can receive a 10% discount on the book by using the code SPECIAL10.
Speakers:
Andrea Lee is the author of four books, including the National Book Award–nominated memoir Russian Journal, the novels Lost Hearts in Italy and Sarah Phillips, and the story collection Interesting Women. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, she has written for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, W, and The New York Times Book Review. Born in Philadelphia, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University and now lives in Italy. The highly anticipated Red Island House will be her first novel to be published in fifteen years.
Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in 20th and 21st century African American literature. Her monograph, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014) received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. She has edited three collections of African American literature: Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (Random House, February 1991; Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women, reprinted Doubleday/Anchor, January 1990; and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, Doubleday/Anchor, September 1987. From 1976-1980, she was the Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit. From 1980 to 1990, she taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She was president of The American Studies Association from 1996-1997 and was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015. Her current project is Afterlives: Legacies of the Black Literary Left.
Shaun Myers is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and has previously taught at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on African diasporic literature and culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially black aesthetics, transit and transnationalism, and black feminist literary histories. Her current book project, Black Anaesthetics: African American Literature Beyond Man, traces posthumanism’s disavowed genealogies in African American literature through writers such as Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Andrea Lee. Myers is also working on a second project examining the art of black transit in the ongoing era of suspended freedom. Her study of black women’s travel writings as expressions of geographic power will appear in African American Literature in Transition: 1980-1990.
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