Saturday, January 5, 2019

Lovalerie King and Maryemma Graham: getting everybody together

I've previously commented that our field has benefited from the efforts of scholar-organizers like Joanne Gabbin, Joycelyn Moody, Brenda M. Greene, Carolyn Denard, Donna Akiba Harper, and others. And as I've also pointed out before, Maryemma Graham and Lovalerie have been noteworthy leading forces with respect to getting everybody together. I've been a witness.

I've lost track of how many times they got all kinds of folks in the same room and on a common project. The range of contributors that Graham and Lovalerie pulled together for projects has been really impressive. They involve people at different stages of their careers. They know the old-school folks. The new school folks. They involve people from PWIs and HBCUs.

Conferences and edited collections were two crucial ways that Lovalerie pulled us together. Here's a list of some of the scholarly gatherings that she was instrumental in implementing:

       2005: "Celebrating the African American Novel" - co-organizer
       2009: "Contemporary African American Literature" - co-organizer
       2011: "African American Literature, Race and Sexual Identity" - co-organizer
       2012: "Contemporary African-American Literature" (NEH Summer Institute) - director
       2013: "Celebrating Contemporary African American Literature: U.S. and Afro-Caribbean Poetry" - co-organizer

Consider the variety of those gatherings, which involved hundreds of people.

The four books that Lovalerie co-edited were good contributions to the field, and they also allowed her to provide publishing opportunities for nearly 50 scholars. Those efforts were extraordinary acts of coordination and generosity on Lovalerie's part. It's who she was.

Part 6: "It works for me": Lovalerie King and retirement

Lovalerie King in context
A Notebook on Lovalerie King

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