Dreaming Out Loud ─ African American Novelists at Work

Dreaming Out Loud brings together essays by many of the most well-known and respected African American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussing various aspects of the vocation, craft, and art of writing fiction. Though many of the writers included here are also accomplished poets, essayists, and playwrights, this collection and the essays it contains remains focused on the novel as a genre and an art form.

Some essays explore the challenges of being an African American writer in the United States, broadly addressing aesthetic and racial prejudice in American publishing and literature and its changing face over the decades. Others are more specific and personal, recounting how the authors came to be a reader and writer in a culture that did not always encourage them to do so. Some are more general and focus on practice and craft, while still other essays offer detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of how famous novels, such as Native Son, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, andThe Color Purple, came to life. Ranging from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, this anthology explores what it has meant to be an African American novelist over the past hundred years.

Found within are essays by twenty-one African American novelists, including Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award-winners Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winners Alice Walker and James Alan McPherson, and well-known canonical writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker.Dreaming Out Loud seeks to inspire writers and readers alike, while offering a fascinating and important portrait of novelists at work in their own words.

CONTRIBUTORS
James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Gayl Jones, Terry McMillan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, Martha Southgate, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Richard Wright

Horace Porter is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Iowa. He currently serves as chair of Iowa’s Department of American Studies as well as the chair of African American Studies. Porter graduated from Amherst College in 1972 and in 1981 received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Before joining Iowa’s faculty in 1999, he taught at Wayne State University, Dartmouth College, University College, London, and Stanford University. He is the author of Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin, Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America, and The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League. His articles and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Black Renaissance, The Antioch Review, Change, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Porter was a consultant for and commentator in the documentary film, Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg. Directed by Kelly and Tammy Rundle and Garry McGee, the documentary focuses on the Iowa native’s activities as a civil rights activist and supporter of the Black Panther Party. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.