This collaborative session, sponsored by MLA's African American Literature Forum and the College Language Association, aims to highlight underdiscussed and understudied writers from within the African American literary tradition. With an emphasis on the ongoing work of expanding the canon, these panelists will be discussing several Black writers whose work has not received significant scholarly attention. Contextualizing these writers within their time as well as our contemporary moment, each of the panelists seeks to highlight the significance and impact of these writers and their works, with an invitation for greater scholarly attention that more explicitly recognizes their contributions to the literary landscape.

Catherine Saunders will discuss the work of Gertrude Dorsey Brown, arguing that a closer look into the contribution of the African American writers of the early 20th century reveals authorship rooted in the Black periodical. Gertrude Dorsey Brown, an Ohio born and based writer, authored short stories that appeared in the twentieth century periodical The Colored American. The stories convey a biting and incisive view of the color line, challenging its prejudiced wrath with the daunting suggestion of its uncertainty. Saunders' paper contemplates Brown’s understudied conceptual lens and examines her use of humor and interiority to explore the extraordinary insight conveyed in the “ordinary” experiences of African American life. Perhaps most significantly, her paper highlights Brown’s literary showcase of the dissolving color line to argue that her work de-centers whiteness and creates a space for Blackness to exist beyond the response and resistance that often accompanies peripheral placement.

Keith Mitchell's discussion takes up Nettie Jones, an often-overlooked figure in the Black (Women’s) Literary Tradition, who produced a singular yet compelling work with Fish Tales (1983) and a subsequent highly-praised follow-up, Mischief Makers, in 1989. Both novels follow the unconventional, highly hedonistic life of their female protagonist, Lewis Jones. Mitchell argues that Fish Tales, published under the editorial guidance of Toni Morrison at Random House, is a provocative, sexually charged novel that defied conventional literary expectations. Despite Morrison’s endorsement and publication alongside the works of celebrated Black writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, who mentored Nettie Jones, Nettie Jones’s novels quickly fell out of the literary landscape. Mitchell's presentation will explore Fish Tales within the broader framework of Black women’s literature in the 1970s and 80s, examining its themes, narrative structure, and the socio-political context of its release. By revisiting Fish Tales, this presentation aims to shed light on Nettie Jones’s place within the Morrison-era literary renaissance, examining why her work has remained in obscurity. Through textual analysis and historical context, this discussion aims to recover Jones’s legacy, positioning her novel as a critical, albeit neglected, piece of African American literary history.

Finally, in her presentation, Delia Steverson notes that, when the Black, southern writer Delores Phillips died in 2014, novelist Tayari Jones remarked that Phillips had gifted the world “one, brilliant novel”—The Darkest Child (2004)—and had faded into a quiet existence until her death. However, what Jones did not realize, and what Steverson reveals in this presentation, is that Phillips was no one-hit wonder. Rather, throughout her lifetime she wrote several short stories, poems, and two additional, albeit unfinished, novels. Steverson posits Phillips as the quintessential understudied Black writer and places Phillips in conversation with more well-known Black writers as entry points to engage her work. Steverson argues that Delores Phillips is a critical voice in the Black literary tradition, and ultimately, aims to situate Phillips within this tradition in order to invite much more scholarly attention of her work.