African American literature will take center stage when a group of innovative scholars come to the University of Oregon to give public talks about their research.

The symposium, “Racial Representations: African American Literature Since 1975,” runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. April 26 in the Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall, 1468 University St.

English professor Mark Whalan and Ernesto Martínez, an associate professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, will serve as moderators.

Whalan joined the University of Oregon as the Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English in 2011; he specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Martínez is the author of “On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility” and co-editor with Michael Hames-García of “Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader,” which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award.

The day concludes with readings of poetry and creative non-fiction from authors Evie Shockley and David Bradley.

Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of “Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry”; her poems and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies and her work has been honored and supported by the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize.

Bradley, an associate professor of creative writing at the UO, is the author of “The Chaneysville Incident” and “South Street”; he has published essays on Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Herman Melville and others and has published articles in Esquire, Redbook, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

Guest presenters include:

• Anthony Reed (Yale), “The Science of Mourning in Contemporary African American Poetry.” Reed is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. He is currently finishing a book called ”Fugitive Time: The Politics and Poetics of Black Experimental Writing,” and beginning research on a project tentatively titled, “Phonographic Poetry,” considering the interplay of poetry and documentation in African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Matt Sandler (UO), “The New Science of Will Alexander.” Sandler teaches literature in the Clark Honors College; his work has appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, and Atlantic Studies and he is currently completing a book on self-help and vernacular American literature.
• Shockley, “Colorblind(ed): Visuality, Discursivity, and Slavery in Rita Dove’s and George Elliott Clarke’s Verse Plays.”
• Howard Rambsy (Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville), “A Golden Age of Inspiration for Black Men Writers, 1977-1997.” Rambsy is an associate professor of literature who teaches African American literature and directs the Black Studies Program. His writings and mixed media exhibits focus on poetry, literary history, and technology and his work has appeared in African American Review, The Southern Quarterly, Black Issues Book Review, The Crisis, and Mississippi Quarterly.
• Erica Edwards (Universityof California-Riverside), “The Racial Commonsense of Counterterror: African American Literature after 9/11.” The associate professor of English is the author of “Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership”; her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as Callaloo, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Women and Performance.
• Shockley, poetry reading.
• Bradley, “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blues.”

Organizer Courtney Thorsson is an assistant professor in the English Department at the UO, where she teaches African American literature. Her current book project, “Revolutionary Recipes,” is a study of culinary discourse and the recipe form in African American cookbooks, poetry and fiction. For more information, contact her at thorsson@uoregon.edu or 541-346-1473.

-- by the UO English Department