Special Announcement: Callaloo Journal, Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival Edition
This special edition of the Callaloo Literary Journal is now available for purchase!
On sale now: Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival Edition of Callaloo Literary Journal
The moment you’ve been waiting for has arrived: Callaloo Literary Journal’s volume 42.3, commemorating the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State University, is now available for purchase!
Our friends at Callaloo have generously provided a discount code for this edition. Follow the link and click send on the automatically generated email to receive the code for 20% off. If you have any issues, feel free to email mwa@jsums.edu with the subject line “Callaloo Discount Code” and we’ll get back to you.
About the issue
In 1973, Margaret Walker hosted a groundbreaking conference for Black women writers for the bicentennial of Phillis Wheatley’s work, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Under the Black Studies Institute that Walker had founded five years earlier at Jackson State, thirty of these leading women participated in a series of lectures, roundtable discussions, poetry readings, and other events on campus, called the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.
Fifty years later, seven of the ten living attendees from the original Festival, including the likes of Alice Walker, Paula Giddings, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Sonia Sanchez, agreed to return to Jackson State for a reconvening of the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, serving as honorary co-chairs and participating in intergenerational conversations with writers like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Imani Perry, and Angie Thomas. Chaired by Jackson State English Professor Dr. Ebony Lumumba, the reconvening paired those plenary and keynote sessions with concurrent sessions featuring original creative writing and literary analysis from students and scholars both local and national.
With such immense creativity and scholarship on display on the days of November 1-3, 2023, it was necessary to create a lasting testament to the wisdom, knowledge and culture shared. In collaboration with the Callaloo Literary Journal, the PWPF Proceeding Journal Committee (Helena Brantley, Alissa Rae Funderburk, Barbara Lewis, C. Liegh McInnis, Craig A. Meyer, Hermine Pinson, RaShell Spears, Angela Stewart, Ming Washington) led by Dr. Tiffany Caesar created a special issue for this purpose. Featuring attendees’ scholastic articles, non-fiction essays, creative fiction, poetry, keynote transcripts, and original Roy Lewis photography from both the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival as well as the 2023 50th reconvening, the 300 page book is a physical manifestation of that joyous event.
Since 1976 Callaloo Literary Journal has become the most essential and continuously published journal in matters pertinent to African American and African Diaspora Studies worldwide. Printed by Johns Hopkins University Press, Callaloo publishes an engaging mixture of original fiction, poetry, critical articles, interviews, drama, and visual art by and about writers and visual artists of African descent from around the globe, making it the best home for this collection. Special thanks are given for the vision of Founding Editor Charles Henry Rowell, and dedication of Executive Editor Kyla Kupferstein Torres, as well as the hard work of Managing Editors Charles Holm and Luke Hankins and Production Editor Rasheeda Saka in bringing this vision to life.
Purchase your copy today! And don’t forget to email us for the discount code.
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