 |
Harryette Mullen | |
|---|---|
 Harryette Mullen, photo by Gloria Graham, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2005 | |
| Born | July 1, 1953 |
| Occupation(s) | English professor, poet, writer |
Harryette Mullen (born July 1, 1953), Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles, [1] is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. [2]
Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. Mullen's most recent work is Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. [3]
Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.
Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s and '70s, including the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement, the Chicano Movement, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981. [4]
Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background. [5]
Mullen has taught at Cornell University and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African-American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. [6] She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN/Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). [6] She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo , published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010. [7]
She appears in the documentary film The Black Candle , directed by M. K. Asante, Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou.
Mullen has stated that she was brought up in Fort Worth, Texas, but that her family is originally from Pennsylvania. [8] Growing up in such a small black community was hard especially because, as Mullen has said in interviews, "a black Southern vernacular was spoken, which my family didn't speak." [9] This created a division between Mullen and her peers who considered her an outsider for speaking "white."
Mullen recalls on the different languages that she learned as a child as opposed to those around her. When one hears the term different languages one thinks of languages that are spoken in other far away foreign places, yet Mullen is discussing the different types of English that are spoken in her community. The English she grew up learning was considered to be the “Standard English,” which is summed up as the proper way of speaking English, the one that will make black people more approachable in a nice part of town, the English that will make a person of color employable. The black vernacular is considered to be incorrect, and if people only spoke this vernacular they would be considered uneducated. This did not sit well with Mullen because she wanted black children to understand that being black and educated were not mutually exclusive terms. Mullen says that she does not believe that certain vernaculars are particularly educated or uneducated; society has however decided for them that there is a right way of speaking and a wrong way.[ citation needed ]
Language is the bridge that can connect two different cultures, and Mullen experienced the opposite of that when she was growing up at first. The "Standard English" she spoke created a barrier for her she could not anticipate. As it does for many other black children that speak "proper" and are considered different for it. This contributes to black children equating their blackness to their language making some feel inadequate because they don’t sound "black enough."[ citation needed ]
As Mullen comes to understand in college there is more than one way of being black, and this came as a shock to her because she was learning about all these other black cultures from a white man. Mullen thought it strange that she could obviously see the blackness of different cultures and yet hold no true meaningful relation to it. There was not type of familiarity between her and all these other black cultures.[ citation needed ]
Even in the black community where she should feel "safe" in or "belong," Mullen felt alienated. Code switching is in many ways the key to survival in these instances. For black children all over they know how to speak when they are hanging out with friends versus how they should speak to a cop if they are pulled over.[ citation needed ]
In 2011, Barbara Henning published a collection of postcard interviews with the author, titled: Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna). In it, Mullen writes, "Poetry, in general, is a rule-breaking activity." [10]
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Jay Wright is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination", inasmuch as it incorporates elements of African, European, Native American and Latin American cultures. Following his receiving the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 2005, Wright is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century. Dante Micheaux has called Wright "unequivocally, the greatest living American poet"."
Thylias Moss is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright of African-American, Native American, and European heritage. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections and anthologies, and she has also published essays, children's books, and plays. She is the pioneer of Limited Fork Theory, a literary theory concerned with the limitations and capacity of human understanding of art.
Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, is a quarterly literary magazine established in 1976 by Charles H. Rowell, who remains its editor-in-chief. It contains creative writing, visual art, and critical texts about literature and culture of the African diaspora, and is the longest continuously running African-American literary magazine.
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles".
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
JesúsAbraham "Tato" Laviera was a Latino poet and playwright in the United States. Born Jesús Laviera Sanches, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, he moved to New York City at the age of ten, with his family, to reside in the Lower East Side. Throughout his life he was involved in various human rights organizations, but was best known as a renowned Nuyorican poet. An obituary for NBC Latino describes him as "one of the greatest representatives of the Nuyorican movement."
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Margo Tamez is a historian, poet, and activist from Texas. She is a member of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, an organization that does not have federal or state recognition.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.
Charles Edwin (Ed) Roberson is a distinguished American poet, celebrated for his unique diction and intricacy in exploring the natural and cultural worlds. His poetic voice is informed by a background in science and visual art, coupled with his identity as an African American. Roberson has been an active poet since the early 1960s and has authored eight collections, including "Atmosphere Conditions" (1999) and "City Eclogue" (2006). Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award (1998) and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (2008).
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
American Sign Language literature is one of the most important shared cultural experiences in the American deaf community. Literary genres initially developed in residential Deaf institutes, such as American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which is where American Sign Language developed as a language in the early 19th century. There are many genres of ASL literature, such as narratives of personal experience, poetry, cinematographic stories, folktales, translated works, original fiction and stories with handshape constraints. Authors of ASL literature use their body as the text of their work, which is visually read and comprehended by their audience viewers. In the early development of ASL literary genres, the works were generally not analyzed as written texts are, but the increased dissemination of ASL literature on video has led to greater analysis of these genres.
Erica Hunt is an American poet, essayist, teacher, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. From 1999 to 2010, she was executive director of the 21st Century Foundation located in Harlem. Currently, she is writing and teaching at Wesleyan University.
Miriam Aparecida Alves is a Brazilian writer, activist and poet.
Doris Davenport, sometimes styled as doris davenport, is a writer, educator, and literary and performance poet. She wrote an essay featured in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color entitled "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin." She also focuses her efforts on poetry and education.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
