Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing

Carmen R. Gillespie

2012
368 pages
ISBN 9781611484915
The Griot Project Book Series

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. In the ensuing forty-plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. This collection, Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing, enables audiences and readers, critics and students, to review Morrison's cultural and literary impact and to consider the import and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

What distinguishes this collection from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer Prize-wining novel, Beloved. Morrison describes her clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Beloved's clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the figurative space she imagines is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

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Reviews

"Gillespie . . . has collected an impressively varied array of genres for this volume. . . . More than a scholarly exploration, the collection celebrates Morrison and her wide influence on other practitioners. . . . Highly recommended."
- CHOICE, August 2013

"Collect[s] an impressively varied array of genres...highly recommended."
--T.H. Oliviero, Pratt Institute, Choice Reviews September 2013.

"Gathering a tapestry of disparate materials, including reviews, letters, interviews, drama, critical essays, memoirs, and photos, Gillespie constructs a rich critical narrative of Morrison's works."
--Tony Bolden, University of Kansas; The Journal of African American History, Vol. 99, no. 3 (summer 2014)

About the author:

Carmen Gillespie is professor of English, director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies, and university arts coordinator at Bucknell University. In addition to articles and poems, she is the author of the scholarly works A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison (2007) and A Critical Companion to Alice Walker (2011). Dr. Gillespie has also published a poetry chapbook, Lining the Rails (2008), and a poetry collection, Jonestown: A Vexation, which won the 2011 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize. Dr. Gillespie's awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry and grants from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Fulbright scholar. Essence named Dr. Gillespie one of its 40 favorite poets in commemoration of the magazine's 40th anniversary.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Paperback: 9781611486346; eBook: 9781611484922