Alice Dunbar-Nelson at 150: New Perspectives on the Writer

Dear Colleagues,

Born in New Orleans in 1875, Alice Moore emerged as a nationally recognized poet and fiction writer when she published Violets and Other Tales (1895). She, like other New Orleans writers, focused on Creole life in New Orleans. She is popular among nineteenth-century American and African American literary scholars; however, thanks to the biographical recovery work of Akasha Hull, she is rightfully discussed in relation to the Harlem Renaissance. Her contributions to American literature from the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries make her an intriguing figure as scholars have analyzed her attention to respectability politics, women’s rights activism, racial identity, children’s rights, and working-class positionality. Although her first two anthologies are accessible online and some of her poetry and short stories are often anthologized, studies of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s work had been largely overlooked until the recent publications of Legacy: A Journal of American Women’s Writers Special Issue and two major book studies between 2001 and 2023. This Special Issue aims to give further attention to her work not only as a fiction writer and poet, but as an editorialist, playwright, diarist, and screenwriter.

This call for submissions does not seek to exclude scholarship on the well-known Violets and Other Tales and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. Instead, this call for submissions hopes to highlight works by the multi-genre writer that have generally been excluded from conversations regarding her oeuvre and to bring new perspectives to work as we celebrate the 150th year anniversary of her birth.

Potential topics and approaches include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The influences of the Black club women’s movement and her activism in her work;
• The relevance of Victorian beliefs in Dunbar-Nelson's work;
• Dunbar-Nelson's poetry (themes or style);
• Romantic poets' influence on Dunbar-Nelson;
• Studies of mental, spiritual, or physical health that emerge in her diaries and/or other works;
• Considerations of disability in her children’s literature or other work;
• New perspectives on passing;
• Journalism and Alice Dunbar-Nelson as a columnist;
• Meaning of place in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction.

For inquiries, contact Dr. Tara Green humanitiesadn@gmail.com

Dr. Tara T. Green
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• nineteenth-century writers
• black journalism
• Harlem Renaissance
• New Orleans writers
• black club women
• black queer women writers
• racial passing
• black women’s poetry
• lesbian/bisexual studies