Engaging Black Women’s Archives: Gloria Naylor and Twentieth-Century Literary History

FAIN: RZ-279805-21

Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA 18015-3027)
Mary Foltz (Project Director: December 2020 to present)
Maxine Montgomery (Co Project Director: February 2021 to present)
Suzanne Edwards (Co Project Director: September 2021 to present)

Preparation of two edited volumes and a series of public-facing essays focused on the archive of American author and intellectual Gloria Naylor (1950-2016). (12 months)

This project proposes to produce an edited collection of scholarly essays on archival materials relevant to Naylor’s published novels, a second manuscript of criticism focused on previously unpublished works found in the archives, and a series of public-facing essays that attend to the collected papers and unpublished material of Gloria Naylor, one of the most widely-read authors at the vanguard of contemporary letters. With Naylor’s substantial archives as our focus, we aim to create a robust model for activating black women’s literary archives through interinstitutional, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational collaboration aligned with black feminist practices. Through ground-breaking academic and public-facing scholarship this project communicates the value of archival research for opening up new avenues for understanding black women writers’ intellectual and literary history of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.