Photograph of Langston Hughes by James Allen
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Reading and Remembering Langston Hughes
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Thomas Fox Averill, writer-in-residence and professor of English at Washburn University of Topeka, teaches courses in creative writing and Kansas literature, folklore and film. His publications include a novel Secrets of the Tsil Café (Penguin Putnam, 2001) and short story collections Passes at the Moon (Woodley Press, 1985) and Seeing Mona Naked (Watermark Press, 1989). He is the editor of What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth-century Writers on the Sunflower State (University Press of Kansas, 1990) and author of To Kansas: How You Know When You Are Here (Eagle Books, 1996), a collection of radio commentaries. |
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Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Deborah Dandridge attended Washington Elementary School, a public school designated for African Americans, before and after the 1954 Supreme Court decision. She received her B.A. in history from Washburn University, an M.A. in history from Atlanta University, and has completed her Ph.D. comprehensive examination in history at the University of Kansas. She currently serves as the field archivist for the African American documentation program sponsored by the Kansas Collection in Spencer Research Library. Her academic fields of interest are the African American historical experience and United States history since the Civil War. |
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Maryemma Graham, Hughes Centennial Committee cochair and symposium director, is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. Founder and director of the Project on the History of Black Writing, she has published more than twenty-five journal articles and essays, and six critical studies, including edited collections on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literature and pedagogy. Recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from NEH, the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the New York Public Library, she is a frequent director of international seminars and public symposia. Her most recent works include Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (Georgia, 2001), and Conversations with Margaret Walker (Mississippi, 2002). She is currently completing with the support of an ACLS fellowship The House Where My Soul Lives: A Biography of Margaret Walker (forthcoming, University Press of Virginia). |
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Steven Hind is a native Kansan educated at Emporia State University and the University of Kansas (MA, 1970). He has recently retired from Hutchinson Community College after 35 years as a teacher of writing and literature in Kansas. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Familiar Ground (1980); That Trick of Silence (1990); and In a Place with No Map (1997). |
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Barbara Ryan is an assistant professor of English and Black studies at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. Her recent publications include an essay on black servitude as depicted by Charles W. Chesnutt, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Victoria Earle Matthews. She gives statewide presentations on Langston Hughes and Mark Twain for the Kansas Humanities Council. |
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Elizabeth Schultz retired in 2001 from the University of Kansas, where she was a Chancellor's Club teaching professor. She has published extensively in the fields of African American fiction and autobiography, nineteenth-century American fiction, American women's writing, and Japanese culture in addition to poetry, short stories, and essays on nature. She is the author of Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-century American Art (University Press of Kansas, 1995) and Shoreline: Seasons at the Lake (Michigan State University Press, 2001). |
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John Edgar Tidwell is an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas. He has published widely on aspects of African American literature, focusing on poets Sterling A. Brown and Frank Marshall Davis. His edition of Davis’s Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) is part of the Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography series. With Mark Sanders of Emory University, he has recently edited Brown’s unpublished travelogue A Negro Looks at the South. His edition of Davis’s unpublished Black Moods: Collected Poems New and Old is in production at the University of Illinois Press. His major current focus is the first full biographical study of Sterling A. Brown. His essays, interviews, book reviews, and editorial work have appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, CLA Journal, and the Langston Hughes Review. |
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Carmaletta M. Williams is an associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. She has won a number of distinguished teaching awards including the Burlington Northern-Sante Faculty Achievement Award, two Distinguished Service Awards from Johnson County Community College, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Kansas Professor of the Year, and the League for Innovation’s Innovation of the Year award for her videotape "Sankofa: My Journey Home." This video was a result of her Fulbright-Hays Award for study in Ghana, West Africa. Williams recently returned from Guinea, West Africa, where she established a faculty exchange between L’Ecole Nationale de Poste et Telecommunications and Johnson County Community College. |