Southern Black Writers -- ep. by Howard Rambsy II

A short take on Southern Black Writers.
Episode by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. Richard Wright was born in Mississippi, where he was primarily raised, though he spent some time as a child in Arkansas and then later in Tennessee. Hurston and Wright are just two of the more famous Black authors born in the South. 

There are many more widely read southern-born Black novelists.  

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions—a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels and more.

Alice Walker, John Oliver Killens, Nettie Jones, and Percival Everett were born in Georgia. Along with Richard Wright John A. Williams, Al Young, and Angie Thomas were born in Mississippi. Sutton E. Griggs and Attica Locke? Texas. 

As a region, the South is the birthplace of a wide range of African American creators—musicians, entertainers, poets, painters, and of course novelists. With its history of brutal segregation and racism, the South undoubtedly carries all kinds of scary connotations in the lived experiences and vivid imaginations of African American writers. 

Southern Black writers such as Wright, Hurston, and Alice Walker produced memorable works set in the South. So did James Weldon Johnson (from Florida) and Ernest Gaines (from Louisiana) and Gayl Jones (from Kentucky). 

Other writers from the region went on to produce outstanding works, including the South Carolina born Alice Childress and the North Carolina native Cecil Brown. And what about S. A. Cosby from Virginia? Or how about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marc Olden from Maryland?  

Among teachers and researchers, southern Black writers have, for many decades now, received tremendous and sustained responses. Professors routinely assign and cover novels by authors from the South, and scholars regularly examine and write about those books by writers born in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and other states in the region.

The influence of the South in novels by Black novelists and the receptions of southern Black writers are quite remarkable.  

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This episode was written by Howard Rambsy. The episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali. 

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.  For more information, visit blacklitnetwork.org.