Awards

• Commended for Who Writes for Black Children? 2018

Overview

Who Writes for Black Children?unlocks a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children.From poetry written by a slave for a plantation school to joyful ""deathbiographies"" of African Americans in the antebellum North to literature pennedby African American children themselves, this volume presents compelling newdefinitions of both African American literature and children's literature.

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9781517900274

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Reviews

Was any literature written specifically for black children living before 1900 in the Western Hemisphere? By posing this question, Capshaw and Duane force a reckoning with a gap in children's literature studies that is predicated on the assumption that slavery invalidated a space for black children to consume literature. --V. A. Murrenus Pilmaier, University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan The volume's strength lies in the interdisciplinary perspectives it provides on both African American children's literature and the experiences of African American child-readers. --The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth Striking the hard-to-accomplish balance between in-process scholarly exploration and textbook framing, this collection manages not only to profess but also, impressively, to teach. --MELUS Who Writes for Black Children? is a compelling collection of scholarly essays and primary material that will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of childhood--or in book history, reading and reception history, materiality, ephemera, or interpretation. Examining poetry, fiction, biography, illustrations, periodicals, friendship albums, pamphlets, marginalia, and more, the collection analyzes the goals and rhetorical strategies of diverse genres published for African American children and (perhaps) read by them. --Journal of American History

Author Information

Katharine Capshaw is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (Minnesota, 2014) and Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Anna Mae Duane is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and coeditor of the journal Common-place. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim.

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