"I began writing about power because I had so little," Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction.

Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.

The emergence of a master artist alongside his first major collection, created during a golden age of art in the nation’s capital

Renowned for his innovative work with silkscreen printing, Lou Stovall’s works are part of numerous collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Phillips Collection. Washington Post art critic Paul Richard once wrote, “As a printer of his own art, and of the art of many others, as a framer and installer and shepherd of collections, Stovall has inserted more art into Washington than almost anyone in town.”

Of the Land: The Art and Poetry of Lou Stovall presents a series of prints and accompanying poems that showcase the artist’s work during the 1970s, when he was developing his unique silkscreen technique and exploring both natural and abstract elements. An introduction by the book’s editor and artist’s son, Will Stovall, along with an autobiography from the artist anchor the Of the Land series in its time and place—a period of jazz, protest, and prolific art production in Washington, DC, that birthed the Washington Color School. Stovall’s contributions, as well as his collaborations with well-known artists like Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Elizabeth Catlett, and Robert Mangold, have cemented him as one of the most significant American artists of our age.

Part of a tradition of African American artists and thinkers who met at Howard University, Lou Stovall created the Workshop in 1968, a small, active silkscreen studio printing posters for arts and DC-focused events. His deep influence on the silkscreen medium, the art community, and DC will be part of his lasting legacy.

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.
 
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.