Editor-in-chief | Duriel E. Harris |
---|---|
Categories | Literary magazine |
Frequency | Biannually |
Founder | Alvin Aubert |
First issue | 1975 |
Company | University of Illinois Press |
Country | United States |
Website | obsidianlit |
ISSN | 2161-6140 (print) 0888-4412 (web) |
OCLC | 1368541089 |
Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (sometimes referred to as Obsidian, Obsidian Lit or Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora) is a biannual literary magazine which was first published in 1975 by Alvin Aubert at SUNY (Fredonia) under the name Obsidian: Black Literature in Review. The magazine has undergone a number of name changes and publication venues over the years, before obtaining its current title in 2014 under editor-in-chief Duriel E. Harris. It is published by the Publications Unit at Illinois State University.
The magazine was established by Alvin Aubert using his own funds and those of various benefactors. Since that time, it has published continuously through financial contributions from individuals, support from various educational institutions, and organizations including the National Endowment of the Arts. [1] The magazine publishes new and established, emerging and contemporary work by artists across the African diaspora in artistic disciplines including literature, visual, sound, and mixed media.It is abstracted and indexed in the Modern Language Association Database. [2]
The periodical won the Parnassus Award for Significant Editorial Achievement in 2018 for volume 42, Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts. [3]
In February 2021, it was approved for an National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Projects award to support outreach to historically Black colleges and universities. [4]
The magazine is one of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses 2021 grant recipients of the Literary Magazine Fund, launched in 2019 with The Amazon Literary Partnership. [5]
Charles Richard Johnson is an American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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.
Bryan Thao Worra is a Laotian American writer and poet.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an American writer, book editor and publisher. In 2020, Thomas was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. He is the author of the collection Crush, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2004. His second book of poems, War of the Foxes, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.
Peepal Tree Press is a publisher based in Leeds, England which publishes Caribbean, Black British, and South Asian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and academic books. Poet Kwame Dawes has said, "Peepal Tree Press's position as the leading publisher of Caribbean literature, and especially of Caribbean poetry, is unassailable."
African American Review is a scholarly aggregation of essays on African-American literature, theatre, film, the visual arts, and culture; interviews; poetry; fiction; and book reviews. It is the official publication of the Modern Language Association's LLC African American. Between 1967 and 1976, the journal appeared under the title Negro American Literature Forum and until 1992 as Black American Literature Forum before obtaining its current title. It is based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Mary Biddinger is an American poet, editor, and academic.
Angela Jackson is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University. Jackson has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Alvin Bernard Aubert was a professor of English, poet, playwright, editor, literary critic, and scholar who championed African-American culture and rural life along the southern Mississippi River. He grew up in Lutcher, Louisiana, and attended Southern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois. He taught at Southern University, SUNY Fredonia,University of Oregon, and Wayne State University. At WSU he was a professor of English, taught creative writing and Afro-American literature, while serving as Interim Chair of the Department of Africana Studies. He founded and edited the award winning journal Obsidian, now Obsidian II, for publishing works in English by, and about, writes of African descent worldwide. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in literature (1955), and a Bread Loaf Scholar in poetry (1968). His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including regular reviews of Afro-American poetry books in Cornell University's "Epoch" magazine. His play, "Home From Harlem," was staged at WSU's Bonstelle Theatre in 1986, and in 1991 he completed his play, "Piney Brown." He served as an advisory editor to literary magazines and served on grants panels for New York's Creative Artist Public Service Program (CAPS), the National Endowment for the Arts, the Coordinating Council for Literary Magazines (CCLM), the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Detroit City Arts Council. He was a member of the College Language Association, the Black Theatre Network, and the Langston Hughes Society.
Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. As of 2008, she is the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College of the Claremont Consortium. As a writer, she focuses on Haitian culture, gender, class, sexuality, and Caribbean women's studies. Her novels have won several awards, including the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
LaShonda Katrice Barnett is an American author, playwright, and former radio host. She has published short stories, edited books on African-American music, and written a trilogy of full-length plays.
The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities is a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the education of residents of the state of Louisiana. In its mission, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities pledges to provide access to and promote an appreciation of the history of Louisiana and its literary and cultural history. It was founded in 1972 as a result of initial funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
Jon Parrish Peede is an American book editor and literary review publisher, who served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2018 to 2021.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is an American poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, whose writing often focuses on culture and travel in the African diaspora. She has been the recipient of several awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her novels include The River Where Blood is Born (1997), which won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction, and Hot Johnny , which was an Essence magazine bestseller in hardcover fiction. She has also taught literature and creative writing at educational institutions internationally, including at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color, the Hurston-Wright Writers Workshop, and Chicago State University.
Rone Shavers is an American author, literature critic, and reviewer. He is an Associate Professor of English at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.