The award will be presented formally at the Business Meeting of the RSAP, May 23-26, 2013, in Boston at the annual conference of the American Literature Association.

Congratulations, Professor Gardner!

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Mitchell posits that lynching violence was a reaction to black success.

“[Mitchell] shows how performing lynching plays in community spaces allowed African Americans to actualize the various subjectivities . . . that lynchings sought to expunge. This book is required reading for understanding the ways in which narrative and performance have been central to challenging white oppression as well as (re)imagining black identity in America. Highly recommended.”–Choice

“An emphatic push to change how we understand, write about, and teach the phenomenon of lynching.”–H-SHGAPE

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, and is an active blogger and public speaker. Her work was highlighted last month on The Ohio State University English Department’s blog. Congratulations, Professor Mitchell!

Locus

Michael Dirda from the Washington Post wrote, “every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country’s most beloved writers,” and Library Journal said Becoming Ray Bradbury is “highly recommended not just for Bradbury fans but for all students of science fiction.”

To vote for Becoming Ray Bradbury access Locus’ online form here.

“It’s our success that beckons the mob.” Professor Mitchell argues that there is a need to move beyond the classification of these plays as “protest art” and address them in the context of examining and being products of African American success in business and family life. Her interview from earlier this month with Mark Anthony Neal on Left of Black begins at 14:00.

On becoming a “Literary Historian.” In this interview with Writers Talk Mitchell recalls her discovery of a diary entry by Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching crusader, claiming that lynching might sometimes be justified. As an undergraduate, Mitchell was interested in what black women writers were saying between 1870 and 1920 and whether they came together with white women for political change. She thought lynching would have been the unifying force, but was proven wrong. But by the time she discovered that, she was hooked on the “lynching plays.”

Update: Read Koritha Mitchell’s blog post elaborating on a point made during her appearance on Left of Black,” Black Art (not equal to) Protest Art: A Contrarian View, Indeed.

The early years of the so-called atomic age that followed the first test of nuclear weapons soon brought atomic science to the forefront of Bradbury’s prose. The final stories in his 1950 work The Martian Chronicles describe Earth’s destruction as a result of atomic war, and the slim hope of a new start on the Red Planet. The similar war that closes Fahrenheit 451 radiated out into some of his best short stories, such as The Last Night of the World – a chilling portrayal of a couple’s routine behaviour on the day before Earth is set to be destroyed.

Yet Bradbury soon realised that technologies capable of ending life on Earth could also lead to space flight, giving hope to his evolving belief that mankind’s destiny was in the stars. The full flowering of rocketry accompanying the space age led him to embrace a new genre of writing – the scientific essay – to celebrate these milestones.

“I had a great time with Eller’s biography; he’s extremely rigorous about tracking the details of Bradbury’s literary development without getting bogged down in an academic prose style. So my interest never flagged, and though I knew the rough outcome—I read Fahrenheit 451 in junior high, too—I wanted to hear all the details. And I really want the sequel that Eller ought to write, since he ends the story just as Bradbury is about to head off to Ireland to write a screenplay of Moby DIck for John Huston.”

“Every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country’s most beloved writers, still with us in his 90s. If you’re a Bradbury fan, at the very least you’ll want to read it — and then, more likely than not, you’ll end up buying your own copy anyway.

Jonathan R. Eller knows his subject’s early life and literary career inside out.”