Season 5: Episode 2 | Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy
College students are often excited to discuss the subtle radicalism of Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Season 5: Episode 1 | African American Novels and the 1990s
The 1990s gave way to a vibrant literary outpouring of African American novels that offered myriad representational possibilities freeing readers and writers alike.
Season 4: Episode 6 | The Story of Battle Royal
How an excerpt from an upcoming novel became a popular short story.
Season 4: Episode 3 | The Evolving Reception of The Bluest Eye
Here’s how a book can be initially misunderstood and ignored, then gain literary recognition and acclaim, become adopted by the education system and taught broadly, and then become banned.
Season 4: Episode 2 | Richard Wright’s Native Son
The story of Richard Wright’s Native Son, the first black American best-seller, a novel that is both a shocking page-turner, and a philosophical provocation stirring controversy to this day.
Season 4: Episode 1 | Toni Morrison and the Seven Days
Here’s how high school students at a school in Maryland responded to Toni Morrison’s the Seven Days from Song of Solomon.
Season 3: Episode 7 | Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Here’s the story of how Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man became a defining midcentury Black novel.
Seasons 3: Episode 6 | Colson Whitehead and Vocabulary
College students at one university have expressed a range of feelings about the many new words that they encounter when reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist.
Season 3: Episode 5 | Paul Beatty and the Booker Prize
Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout became the first novel by an American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016.
Season 3: Episode 4 | Trudier Harris’s Prolific Scholarship on African American Novels
A brief discussion of the prolific scholarship on African American novels by scholar Trudier Harris.