African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner
This chapbook brings together five young writers, Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May, in a chapbook of poems that employs an invigorating range of tonalities and moods to engage directly with Faulkner’s writings, characters, and verbal art, as well as with his historical example as a race-haunted white southerner who struggled, often unsuccessfully, with the changing racial landscape of twentieth-century America. A brief preface by Elliott and Harriell situates the group’s efforts in relation to those of precursors like Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), who called on black writers to come to a fuller, firmer reckoning with Faulkner in their work. In the nineteen poems gathered here, Elliott, Griffiths, Harriell, Horton, and May take their place alongside the Komunyakaa of “Tobe’s Blues,” the Lucille Clifton of “My Friend Mary Stone from Oxford Mississippi,” and other black poets who have risen to Madhubuti’s challenge.