The Literary Navigator Device -- ep. by Howard Rambsy II

A brief take on the Literary Navigator, a digital platform offering personalized recommendations across Black literature—connecting novels, poems, essays, and comics for curious readers.

Script by Howard Rambsy II

Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

Are you curious about discovering a book by a Black woman? Do you want to read a poem by a Black man from the early 20th century? Are you looking for a 21st-century science fiction young adult novel? Well, we have some recommendations for you.

 You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions — a podcast about the reach and circulation of African American literary art and more.

 On October 11, 2021, as part of our Black Lit Network, we launched the Novel Generator Machine, a digital resource that now contains 1,500 novels by Black writers. On August 8, 2025, we transformed the Novel Generator into the Literary Navigator Device, or simply, the Navigator. Along with novels, the Navigator now includes hundreds of poems, short stories, essays, autobiographies, and comic books.

 Visitors to the site can click filters such as author gender, format, period of publication, and genre to receive recommendations. The site addresses long-standing questions about reading suggestions and access.

 For decades, scholars of African American literature have exchanged recommendations among themselves and with their students. But they have not always found ways to circulate those suggestions to the broader public. The Navigator seeks to change that. It was built with readers curious about Black artistic writing in mind.

 One reason we have seen relatively few large-scale digital projects in African American literary studies is because of the lack of digital humanities infrastructure, which has prevented the development of comprehensive, public-facing databases. This absence has limited the visibility of Black literary history in digital spaces where many readers now go first to discover books.

 Fields of literary studies have often prioritized single-authored books for specialized audiences rather than collaborative projects for general readers. As a result, innovative, collective projects that serve general audiences have often remained underdeveloped. The Navigator takes a different path.

The Navigator is the result of collaboration between scholars of Black literature, digital humanists, and technologists. Merging area knowledge in African American literature and literary studies with data design, coding, and platform development made the project possible.

Our project was also fueled by the curiosity of readers asking questions like: “What should I read next?” “Which Black women writers should I know?” and “What poems are essential for understanding Black literary history?” The Navigator is designed to answer those questions.

Part of what makes the Navigator unique is its effort to connect modes of literature. Users looking for novels will receive recommendations for those works, but they will also be guided to related short stories and comic books. A search for autobiographies published by women might also lead to essays and poems.  

In other words, the Navigator assists readers in traversing the expansive terrain of Black literature. 

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This episode was written by Howard Rambsy, edited by Elizabeth Cali, and read by me, Kassandra Timm.

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