Lineage w genres5/7/2023 They spoke in that kind of self-educated language of working-class, southern Black people.Īnd Zora Neale Hurston’s work said, This language is worthy of literature, this language is already poetry. My dad was from a small town in Alabama, my mom was from a small town in Georgia. And I could relate to Janie-the way she spoke was the way my grandmother spoke. I was just blown away by Their Eyes Were Watching God and found its depiction of Black southern language, Black southern poetry, beautiful. First of all, how come I haven’t read this before? I was mad and I was amazed that here was a writer, writing in the 1930s in a way that still spoke so urgently to me across the decades. In Professor Forrest’s class, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time. And at the time, I didn’t fully know what that meant. Professor Forrest used to always brag about the fact that Toni Morrison was his editor. The next big discovery for me was my first year of college, going to Northwestern University, and taking an African American literature course with Leon Forrest, who was himself a great African American writer. I pulled Sula from the shelf, started reading it, and I started having heart palpitations. I discovered a couple of books by this writer named Toni Morrison. I bought Sula and Song of Solomon that day-the first books I ever bought with my own money. I started reading it, and I think I started having heart palpitations. I pulled Sula from the shelf because I was drawn to the cover. And so of course, me being the bookworm that I am, I spent my free afternoon in a bookstore. During high school, I took a trip to DC, and we were given a free day. Thomas’s class who have been hugely influential to me are Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. That’s when my dual identity as both a journalist and a literary writer emerged. I became the editor of the school newspaper when I was a junior, which was a big deal because that meant I was editing seniors.īOYD: It was the first time a junior had been made editor of the newspaper. I also had an influential high school journalism teacher, Velma Smith. This is where my lineage begins-and so that’s when I first started to see myself as a literary writer, with literary aspirations. Through her, I read Alice Walker, I read James Baldwin, I read Ann Petry. Her class was this immersive experience in American literature. In high school, I had an excellent AP English teacher, a Black woman named Ora Cosby Thomas. VALERIE BOYD: I’m devoted to nonfiction-but I’ve also been influenced by fiction writers. SEJAL SHAH: How do you trace your lineage as a nonfiction writer? In this lively conversation, which took place via Zoom in June 2021 and has been condensed and edited for clarity, they shared the books that made them want to write, discussed the differences between editors of color and white editors, and considered the importance of anthologies and key texts in writers’ lives, as well as the ways in which the absence of writers of color from these anthologies adds to their historic erasure. Boyd edited Shah’s collection of essays, This Is One Way to Dance, for the UGA Press Crux series and has welcomed Shah as a guest at the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction that she directs at the university. Since then, the two women, who’d previously only known each other on social media, have become friendly collaborators. Boyd, then coeditor of the Crux series in literary nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press, wrote to ask if Shah had a manuscript in progress. Sejal Shah and Valerie Boyd first corresponded in 2016, after an essay by Shah appeared in Brevity’s special issue on race, racism, and racialization. On what's missing from most anthologies, how shared texts create soulmates, and why we need more editors of color
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