Thursday, June 18, 2020
Juneteenth Day commemorates the day, June 19, 1865, when Texas slaves were officially informed of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Clearly, it took a while for the news to spread, as President Lincoln’s proclamation was issued more than two years earlier. To mark the holiday librarian style, here’s a podcast and a reading list.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s (WPR) podcast is from January 2020: The Greatest Works Ever Written by African American Women. Rob Ferrett of WPR’s Central Time interviews Morgan Jerkins and Sandra Adell about African American women writers.
They discuss The ZORA Canon: The 100 greatest books ever written by African American women, “a list of 100 masterworks, spanning 160 years of African American women’s literature, divided into sections from pre-emancipation to the present, including fiction and nonfiction, novels, plays, anthologies, and poetry collections and ranging in subject matter from the historical to the personal (and sometimes both at once).” The article appears on Zora online magazine, a Medium publication for women of color.
Morgan Jerkins is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts; the author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America; and the author of Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots.
Sandra Adell is a Literature Professor for the Department of Afro-American Studies; the author of Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen: A Memoir; and a co-editor of Contemporary Plays by African American Women Ten Complete Works.
Happy Juneteenth reading and listening!