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From the Publisher:
One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the reading and writing of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize has helped launch the careers of a score of previously "undiscovered" writers, many of whom have enjoyed great commercial success as well as critical acclaim, earning favorable reviews in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Newsweek, and the Chicago Tribune.

20 is a culmination of twenty years of excellence in short fiction writing. It celebrates the hopes, dreams, and individual successes of all the authors who participated in the contest through the past two decades. The Drue Heinz Literature Prize's mission supports and recognizes those writers brave enough to tackle the challenging genre of short fiction. The stories contained in this volume stand as proof: mission accomplished.

A Dark & Splendid Mass is a 1990s look at societal issues and African Americans in crises and love. Mari Evans's literary works first appeared during the Black Literary Explosion of the 1960s, and her poetry has continued to astonish, intrigue and electrify readers around the world. Hers is an early voice that speaks of Black life and love. Her poems, essays and plays are widely read and taught in Black and Women's Studies Programs.

DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) was a central figure in the Charleston and the Southern Renaissance. His influence extended to the Harlem Renaissance as well. However, Heyward is often remembered simply as the author of Porgy, the 1925 novel about the poorest black residents of Charleston, South Carolina. Porgy -- the novel and its stage versions -- has probably done more to shape views worldwide of African American life in the South than any twentieth-century work besides Gone with the Wind. This reader acquaints us with writings by Heyward that have been overshadowed by Porgy, and it also plumbs the complex sensibilities of the man behind that popular and enduring creation.

James M. Hutchisson's introduction relates aspects of Heyward's life to his creative growth and his gradual shift from staunch social conservatism to a liberal (though never revolutionary) advocacy of black rights. The reader collects ten essays by Heyward on topics ranging from an aesthetics of African American art to the history of Charleston. Heyward's poetry is represented by eighteen pieces from the collections Carolina Chansons, Skylines and Horizons, and Jasbo Brown and Other Poems. Also included are three song lyrics Heyward wrote for the opera Porgy and Bess. The sampling of Heyward's fiction includes "The Brute" and The Half Pint Flask and excerpts from the novels Porgy, Mamba's Daughters, and Peter Ashley.

Here is an ideal introduction to a figure whose inner conflicts were closely tied to those of his beloved South: struggles between privilege and poverty, black and white, and art for the few versus art for the masses.

Winner of the 1997 White Pine Press Poetry Prize, the poetry of Jacqueline Joan Johnson has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. Reviewer Maurice Kenny writes, "Johnson's collection holds not only the spirit and sensuous quality of Alabama but also the concrete strengths of Brooklyn. Ms. Johnson's lush language has the texture of quince and the durability of earth. These memorable poems are sturdy reminders of what life in contemporary America is".

McElroy travels the world discovering new facets of her African American woman's experience -- in prose that waltzes at the sedate pace of Arthur Murray, leaps with the grace of ballet, and clickety-clacks, with the energy of tap. Following female heroes who took no stuff, McElroy remains true to herself.

This exclusive Blue Mountain Arts series brilliantly showcases an unprecedented, creative design. Alive with combinations of vivid, harmonizing colors, it reflects all the feelings and shades of life. The hand-dyed and handcrafted paper used to create these hardcover books makes each title in this series a dynamic standout. The touching, powerful words found inside express all the thoughts that customers love to share with special people for every occasion.

This multidisciplinary volume highlights the African presence throughout the Americas, and African and African Diasporan contributions to the material and cultural life of all of the Americas, and of all Americans. It includes articles from leading scholars and from cultural leaders from both well-known and little-known African Diasporan communities. Privileging African Diasporan voices, it offers new perspectives, data, and interpretations that challenge prevailing understandings of the Americas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Africa has long captured the Western imagination as a land shrouded in danger and mystery. British and American novels written before World War II established popular conventions and stereotypes about Africa that have been increasingly challenged by contemporary American novels set in Africa. Kuhne's book overviews the ways in which Africa has been employed as a powerful setting for American novels written since World War II. Kuhne argues that contemporary American novels with African settings are largely didactic, that these novels convey specific lessons about Africa and Africans, and that they compare African and American cultures in order to evaluate and critique the two worlds. The book begins by summarizing the conventions and themes Westerners have traditionally associated with Africa and by detailing how British and American authors from Aphra Behn to Ernest Hemingway depicted Africa before World War II. It then looks at contemporary American novels set in invented African nations, novels that typically suggest that the problems that trouble actual African nations are the result of colonialism. A separate chapter then examines the African novels of African Americans, which generally aim to correct the historical record, refute stereotypes, and detail the horrors of the slave trade. The volume also looks at genre fiction set in Africa, while a final chapter discusses postcolonial novels with African settings.

From its origins in early 18th century slave communities to the end of the 20th century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States. This book provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. 70 color illustrations. 5 linecuts.

"All My Relatives" challenges the prevailing notion that the work of all American writers reflects a sense of determined individualism. Highlighting works by Frank Chin, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, N. Scott Momaday, Tomas Rivera, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman, Bonnie TuSmith shows that a "first language of community" exists within the cultures of ethnic Americans and is evident in their literary texts. TuSmith suggests that the proper understanding of these texts demands that we dismiss an interpretive frame borrowed from European-American literature.
"All My Relatives" provides a new way of reading popular works such as "The Woman Warrior," "The Joy Luck Club," "The Color Purple" and John Edgar Wideman's "Sent for You Yesterday." TuSmith's study will appeal to general readers as well as students and scholars of American culture, ethnic studies, and American literature.
"An original contribution to the field. TuSmith's willingness to step over invisible boundaries and to draw parallels between the cultural contexts of several ethnic groups at once is refreshing and important." --Amy Ling, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Ambitious and timely . . . a significant work that Americanists will want to read. TuSmith does an excellent job of clarifying the meaning and significance of the term "ethnicity" in relation to American literature."--Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University
." . . TuSmith establishes the importance of traditional (usually oral) modes of expression to ethnic texts that are both relational and accessible . . . . ?S¿hould become a standard point of reference in the emerging field of comparative Americanliterature."--Choice
Bonnie TuSmith is Assistant Professor of English, Bowling Green State University.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by
which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early
Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.
While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals,
and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.
American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s

From the Publisher:
Speaking from the heart on a wide range of topics - religion and the spirit, writing and language, families and identity, politics and social change - Walker begins with a moving autobiographical essay in which she describes her own spiritual growth and the roots of her activism, including reflections about religion in The Color Purple. She goes on to explore many important private and public issues: being a daughter and raising one, dreadlocks, banned books, civil rights, gender communication, and the ritual mutilation of children in Ghana. She writes about Zora Neale Hurston and Salman Rushdie and offers advice for Bill Clinton, for Fidel Castro, and for young women growing up. She comments on culture and cats, feminism and race, writing and living. Here are a wise woman's thoughts as she interacts with the world today, and an important portrait of an activist writer's life.

Nearly a century after his birth in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes is, in a sense, coming home. The University of Missouri Press is proud to announce the publication of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, a compilation of the novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays by one of the twentieth century's most prolific and influential African American authors. The seventeen-volume series will make available Hughes's most famous works as well as less well known and out-of-print selections, providing readers and libraries with a comprehensive source for the first time.

Hughes moved to Harlem in the 1920s and ultimately became the most prominent figure in the literary, artistic, and intellectual phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote articles for The Crisis and in 1926 published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. Over the decades until his death in 1967, he became one of the best-known and most versatile American writers of the twentieth century. His creative range -- poetry, novels, short fiction, drama, translations, gospel-song plays, libretti, juvenile fiction, radio and television scripts, history, biography, and autobiography -- is unique in American letters.

The seventeen volumes of the Collected Works are to be published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar. The volume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.

In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, covering the years through 1931, Hughesoffers recollections of his childhood in Kansas, his high school years in Cleveland, his sojourn with his father in Mexico, and his initial reactions to New York City and Harlem.

Commentaries on the "Black Renaissance" in Harlem and Washington, D.C., are intertwined with recollections of his student years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, his travels through the South, and his association as a "younger generation" poet with the New York and Harlem literary establishment represented by Crisis and Opportunity magazines. Personal memories of Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, Vachel Lindsey, Leila Walker, and others are augmented by allusions to such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Florence Mills, Eubie Blake, Josephine Baker, Bert Williams, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, and Bessie Smith.

Hughes addresses such controversial issues as his literary and personal disagreements with Zora Neale Hurston over their play Mule Bone, Carl Van Vechten's problematic novel Nigger Heaven, racial matters at Lincoln University, the Jim Crow laws in the South, and the failures of white patronage. Furthermore, Hughes refers to the sources of a blues poetry aesthetic, his visit to Cuba, and the struggle to complete his first novel, Not without Laughter. A rare presentation of the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of an insider, The Big Sea also offers a "black perspective" on the expatriate life in Europe during the Roaring Twenties.