On Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 4 PM EST, Black Women Radicals and The Gloria Naylor Archive hosted the event, "Exploring Gloria Naylor's Archive". What can the archives of Gloria Naylor teach us about abolition, Black joy, resistance, sisterhood, and Black women’s transnational networks? How can Naylor’s archives give critical insights to our current political climate and to the transformative and new futures to come? The board of The Gloria Naylor Archive explored and celebrated the life, works, activism, and legacy of award-winning novelist Gloria Naylor (1950-2016), whose published and unpublished literary works offer important perspectives on past, present, and even future political organizing.
About Gloria Naylor: Gloria Naylor (1950-2016) is best-known for her beloved novels-The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, Bailey’s Café, The Men of Brewster Place, and 1996-but her aesthetic and intellectual projects encompassed a range of forms. She was also an essayist, a teacher, a film producer, a screenwriter and playwright, an active correspondent, and a teacher, scholar, and archivist of twentieth-century Black life.
About The Gloria Naylor Archive: The Gloria Naylor Archive is an interdisciplinary and multi-institution collaboration, facilitates engagement with Gloria Naylor’s life and works by making her collected papers widely accessible-to scholars, educators, students, and fans. You can visit the website to her archive here: wordpress.lehi...
Bios of Panelists:
Suzanne Edwards: Suzanne Edwards, Ph.D, co-ordinates the processing and digitization of archival materials as well as the 2021 symposium. The PI of the Naylor Accelerator grant, she also is an Associate Professor in the English department and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Lehigh University. Her scholarship on Gloria Naylor has been published in Chaucer Review and African American Review (with Trudier Harris).
Mary Foltz: Mary Foltz is Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. Her book, Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t (Palgrave 2020), includes a chapter on Linden Hills that explores how Naylor uses scatological imagery to address constructions of race and the impact of racism. In 2019, Foltz worked with Lehigh team members to secure grant funding to digitize portions of the Naylor archive and to organize a symposium focused on how the archive opens up new directions for Gloria scholarship. Foltz’s current research attends to bibliographies in the Naylor archive, which Naylor developed as she wrote her renowned novels. Foltz also is working with Maxine Lavon Montgomery and Suzanne Edwards to produce an edited collection of Naylor scholarship inspired by the archive.
Ayanna Woods: Ayanna Woods is the Gloria Naylor Archive’s Research Assistant for the 2020-2021 academic year. Ayanna is currently processing archival materials, managing social media for the archive, and assisting with planning and organization for the Naylor Archive Symposium later this year. Ayanna earned her B.A. in English from Howard University and will receive an M.A. in Literature with a focus in Social Justice in 2021. Her research centers Black women writers and non-traditional models of literary criticism, and Memory Work.
Randi Gill-Sadler: Randi Gill-Sadler, PhD, is an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College. Her scholarly and teaching interests include African American and Afro- Caribbean women’s literature, US empire and Black feminist theory. She is currently working on a book manuscript that shifts the geography of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the real and fictional islands in June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara and Gloria Naylor’s literary work to asserts that African Americans’ growing participation in US Empire in the 1970s and 1980s was a central political and aesthetic concern of Black women writers. Gill-Sadler has discussed her ongoing work on Naylor on the Electric Marronage podcast and the Arizona State University Black Ecologies Discussion Series.
Stephanie Powell Watts: Stephanie Powell Watts is the author of No One is Coming to Save Us, winner of the 2018 NAACP Image Award in Fiction, the inaugural selection of the American Library Association Award, and the 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her fiction has been honored with the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Excellence, a Whiting Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many publications including the New York Times, BBC International, and the 2020 Best American Essays.
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