The noted poet, playwright, and novelist offers a collection of intensely personal poems intended to map out the geography of life and beauty that she would declare for her daughter
Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship. Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.
Where do children travel when they read a story? In this collection, scholars and authors explore the imaginative geography of a wide range of places, from those of Indigenous myth to the fantasy worlds of Middle-earth, Earthsea, or Pacificus, from the semi-fantastic Wild Wood to real-world places like Canada’s North, Chicago’s World Fair, or the modern urban garden. What happens to young protagonists who explore new worlds, whether fantastic or realistic? What happens when Old World and New World myths collide? How do Indigenous myth and sense of place figure in books for the young? How do environmental or post-colonial concerns, history, memory, or even the unconscious affect an author's creation of place? How are steampunk and science fiction mythically re-enchanting for children? Imaginative geography means imaged earth writing: it creates what readers see when they enter the world of fiction. Exploring diverse genres for children, including picture books, fantasy, steampunk, and realistic novels as well as plays from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland from the early nineteenth century to the present, Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography provides new geographical perspectives on children’s literature.