Join us for the kickoff of Revival: Lost Southern Voices 2023 (RLSV)! Maryemma Graham will be in conversation with RLSV co-founder Pearl McHaney about Graham's book The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker. View the program for the festival here.

REGISTRATION TYPES:

Virtual Admission: Receive the link to stream this event on Zoom

In-person Admission: Join us in the Decatur Library Auditorium

Pre-order The House Where My Soul Lives: PURCHASE

About Revival: Lost Southern Voices

Revival: Lost Southern Voices (RLSV) celebrates historically excluded, erased, or marginalized Southern voices. During this annual literary festival, presenters discuss Southern authors or artists whose works are out-of-print or otherwise do not receive the attention they deserve. We invite the public, scholars, students, writers, and inquisitive readers to join the conversation as we continue to discover and revive these Lost Southern Voices. A collaboration between Georgia State University Perimeter College and the Georgia Center for the Book, (RLSV) celebrates its seventh year with a four-day festival combining in-person and virtual events, from March 22-25, 2023. RLSV is made possible with funding from the DeKalb Library Foundation, Georgia State University Perimeter College, and a grant from Georgia Humanities. The Georgia Center for the Book at DeKalb County Public Library has been an RLSV partner since 2019. RLSV is free and open to the public. Registration is required for all events. Visit georgiacenterforthebook.org/rlsv for more information.

About The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker

This first biography of poet and writer Margaret Walker (1915-98) offers a comprehensive close reading of a Maryemma Graham, a native of Augusta, Georgia, is University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kansas and Founding Director of the History of Black Writing (HBW), which she established at the University of Mississippi in 1983. HBW has led national and international initiatives to promote research, teaching, and public engagement with Black literary studies with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford, and Mellon Foundations. Professor Graham is the author of 12 books that have helped to redefine the field, especially: The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel and, with Jerry W. Ward, The Cambridge History of African American Literature. On the occasion of the History of Black Writing’s 40th anniversary, and Graham’s retirement from teaching to writing full-time, an intergenerational panel of distinguished scholars gathered at the Modern Language Association’s January 2023 conference to celebrate accomplishments, ongoing significance, and new ventures in archiving, programming, and literary research, and its expanding community of digital scholars and practitioners. Maryemma Graham, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas, is at work on two new books. The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker was published in December 2022 and is the first complete biography of award-winning poet, writer, and institution builder Margaret Walker. www.grahamworks.net.

Charis Books and More will have a limited number of copies of The House Where My Soul Lives available for purchase at the event. To secure a copy for signing at RLSV 2023, click the following link to pre-order a copy to be picked up at the event: PURCHASE.

About the Keynote Speaker

Maryemma Graham is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983 she founded the Project on the History of Black Writing, which has been at the University of Kansas since 1999. With 10 published books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998), and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988) and more than 100 essays, book chapters, and creative works, she will publish with support from the Hall Center for the Humanities the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary with co-editors Andrée-Anne Kekeh (Université Paris 8) and Janis A. Mayes (Syracuse University) in 2014 and The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker in 2015. Her public humanities initiatives and international projects since her arrival at KU include The Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, 2002-2005, the Language Matters teaching initiative for the Toni Morrison Society 2003-2010, the Haiti Research Initiative 2011, and Don’t Deny My Voice, whose first summer institute on African American poetry was held in 2013. Graham has been a John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Ford and Mellon Fellow and has received more than 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to African American literature and culture, Graham teaches course in genre studies (the novel and autobiography), Inter American Studies (transnationalism, the Global South) and is an active proponent of the digital humanities.

About Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry at age fifteen, when she entered college. She received a BA from Northwestern University in 1935 and an MA from the University of Iowa in 1940. In 1936, she joined the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago, where she became friends with Richard Wright and joined his South Side Writers Group.

In 1941, Walker became the first African American poet to receive the Yale Younger Poets Prize, for her debut collection For My People (Yale University Press, 1942). She was also the author of the poetry collections This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989), October Journey (Broadside Press, 1973), and Prophets for a New Day (Broadside Press, 1970).

Walker married Firnist Alexander in 1943, and together they had four children. In 1949, they moved to Mississippi, where she joined the faculty at Jackson State College. She returned to the University of Iowa for her doctoral studies and received a PhD in 1965. The following year, she published her dissertation as a novel, Jubilee (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), which was based on the life of her great-grandmother.

In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People at Jackson State College. As director of the institute, which was later renamed the Margaret Walker Center, she organized the 1971 National Evaluative Conference on Black Studies and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.

After Walker retired from teaching in 1979, she published On Being Female, Black, and Free (University of Tennessee Press, 1997), a collection of personal essays, and Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (Warner Books, 1988), a work of nonfiction informed by her friendship with Wright. She died of cancer on November 30, 1998 in Jackson, Mississippi.

About the Moderator

Pearl McHaney, Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita of Georgia State University, and co-founder of Revival: Lost Southern Voices, is the editor of Eudora Welty Review, Danièle Pitavy-Souques’s essays gathered in The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty, and Eudora Welty as Photographer. Pearl also published A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography. She was honored to host Maryemma Graham as a Georgia State University Provost Visiting Scholar in 2018.

This event is free and open to the public, but RLSV welcomes donations of any amount.