Trudier Harris | |
---|---|
Born | Mantua , Alabama, U.S. | February 27, 1948
Occupation | Literary scholar, author, educator |
Alma mater | Stillman College |
Trudier Harris (born February 27, 1948) [1] is an American literary scholar, author, writing consultor, and educator. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama and held the position of J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [2] [3] [4] Harris is a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. [5]
Harris was born on February 27, 1948, in Mantua, Greene County, Alabama. She was the sixth of nine children born to Terrell Harris Sr. and Unareed Burton Moore Harris. Harris has three older sisters: Fannie Mae, Hazel Gray, and Eva Lee. She also has two older brothers: Terrell Jr. and Willie Frank. After Harris was born, her younger siblings Peter, Eddie Lee, and Annie (Anna) Louise were born.
Harris was named by her mother after a concert she went to see at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while she was pregnant with Harris. The concert was performed by an artist named Cordelia and Harris's mother was fond of the last syllables of the singer's name. Her first name was misprinted on the original birth certificate as "Trudy", which Harris did not discover until the mid-1970s; soon after the discovery her name was corrected to Trudier, on the document, and Harris believes her mother was the one who corrected the certificate. [6] Her name is something she is proud of because her mother crafted her name.
Her early childhood years were spent on her 80-acre family owned cotton farm in Greene County, Alabama. She learned how to can vegetables and kill hogs to help contribute to the family’s work. The family farm was successful, but her father still had to face prejudices of the day, and was jailed for an entire year after being accused of stealing a bale of cotton. Her father died when Harris was six years old from a heart attack on September 4, 1954. [7] After her father’s death, Unareed sold the family cotton farm and moved herself and all the kids to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Harris and her siblings attended an all-black elementary school, which took some adjusting due to negative stigmas of being from the countryside. Harris and her siblings also had to eat the provided free lunch rather than being able to buy and pick their lunch, which also separated them from other students who were in higher economic social classes.
Harris participated in softball and basketball and maintained honor roll grades throughout her childhood. [7] While the kids were in school Unareed worked as a domestic for white families, then later as a janitor and cook at an elementary school. For the majority of Harris’ early childhood she lived on Fosters Ferry Road and as she grew up her family moved to a house in Lincoln Park, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where her sister Anna still lives today. Harris’ oldest brother, Terrell, was the first in the family to attend college and he attended Jackson State University in 1962 on an academic and athletic scholarship. [7]
Harris attended the all-black Druid High School in Tuscaloosa, where she wrote her graduating class' senior play. After high school, she attended Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and was highly active on campus. [8] She became president of her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. She was also a student worker and served as an assistant to Dean John Rice, who is the father of future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. [8] In college, Harris also started to participate in local protests as part of the civil rights movement. She graduated in 1969 with a B.A. degree in English and a minor in social studies. [8] Harris and three of her other siblings were able to receive a degree from a higher level of education. [6]
After receiving her undergraduate degree Harris attended a summer exchange program at Indiana University, which inspired her to go onto graduate school. She attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she received her master's and doctoral degrees in American Literature and Folklore in 1973 [9]
After Harris graduated from Ohio State University, she was hired as a professor at the College of William & Mary, where she was the first African-American tenured professor. [10] In 1979, she started teaching in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [8] Harris was at UNC until 1993 when she briefly moved to work in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory University until 1996, when she transferred back to Chapel Hill, holding the position of J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor. Harris retired in 2009 after 27 years of teaching courses in African-American literature and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [11]
Harris became bored during retirement and decided to join the English department at the University of Alabama in her childhood town, Tuscaloosa. During her time at the University of Alabama, the Black Faculty and Staff Association established the "Dr. Trudier Harris Intercollegiate Black History Scholar Bowl". This is a yearly competition among surrounding universities in Alabama "to showcase their scholarly knowledge of African American History in a variety of categories." [12] Harris served as a University Distinguished Research Professor of English until she retired for the second time in February 2022. After her retirement, she was named a Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama. Although Harris no longer works for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or the University of Alabama, she still is an avid fan of Carolina basketball and the Crimson Tide football team. [11]
In 2018, College of William & Mary awarded her an honorary degree. [13]
Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.
Ann Petry was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).
Helene Johnson was an African-American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. She is remembered today for her poetry that captures both the challenges and the excitement of this era during her short-lived career.
Mari Evans was an African-American poet, writer, and dramatist associated with the Black Arts Movement. Evans received grants and awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Indianapolis Public Library Foundation. Her poetry is known for its lyrical simplicity and the directness of its themes. She also wrote nonfiction and edited Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, an important and timely critical anthology devoted to the work of 15 writers. Evans died at the age of 97 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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.
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
Dorothy West was an American novelist short-story writer, and magazine editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated black art, literature, and music. She was one of the few Black women writers to be published in major literary magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family and their attempts to climb the social ladder. She also explored the complexities of the black experience in the United States in short stories and essays that challenged stereotypes and explored themes such as race, class, and gender. Her work paved the way for future generations of African-American writers, and her legacy continues to inspire and influence writers today.
Nellie Yvonne McKay was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.
Houston Alfred Baker Jr. is an American scholar specializing in African-American literature and Distinguished University Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Baker served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the journal American Literature, and has authored several books, including The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), and Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1993), as well as editing literary collections. Baker was included in the 2006 textbook Fifty Key Literary Theorists, by Richard J. Lane.
Barbara T. Christian was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published articles, Christian was most well known for the 1980 study Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition.
Sarah Elizabeth Wright was an American writer and social activist. Her novel This Child's Gonna Live, published in 1969, was acclaimed by critics and "was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex". The New York Times named it "outstanding book of 1969" and it was called a "small masterpiece".
Pearl Cleage is an African-American playwright, essayist, novelist, poet and political activist. She is currently the Playwright in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and at the Just Us Theater Company. Cleage is a political activist. She tackles issues at the crux of racism and sexism, and is known for her feminist views, particularly regarding her identity as an African-American woman. Her works are highly anthologized and have been the subject of many scholarly analyses. Many of her works across several genres have earned both popular and critical acclaim. Her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) was a 1998 Oprah's Book Club selection.
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies. Holloway is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
Effie Lee Newsome (1885–1979), born Mary Effie Lee in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a Harlem Renaissance writer. She mostly wrote children's poems, and was the first famous African-American poet whose work was mostly in this area. She edited a column in The Crisis from 1925 until 1929, called "The Little Page", where she made drawings and wrote poetry for children and parables about being young and black in the 1920s. Newsome also illustrated for children's magazines and edited children's columns for Opportunity.
The Chip Woman's Fortune is a 1923 one act play written by American playwright Willis Richardson. The play was produced by The Ethiopian Art Theatre and is historically important as the first serious work by an African American playwright to be presented on Broadway. Although Broadway had seen African American musical comedies and revues, it had never seen a serious drama.
Arthenia J. Bates Millican was an American poet, short-story writer, essayist, and educator whose published writings include the books Seeds Beneath the Snow (1969), The Deity Nodded (1973), and Such Things from the Valley (1977).