African American Women Writers in the Joanna Banks Collection
On exhibit January 13 - July 31, 2020
This exhibition explores how African American women of the late twentieth century authored books across multiple genres as they explored Black cultural and intellectual traditions. Novels, poetry, cookbooks, children’s books, essays, biographies and autobiographies, music, sermons, folklore, and art were all employed for this purpose, and are highlighted in this exhibition. Wherever possible, lesser-known works by prominent Black women writers are exhibited, often in genres that emphasize the range of their talents.
The exhibition celebrates the 2018 gift from the collector Joanna Banks of her library of late-twentieth-century African American books, with a particular focus on women writers, children’s books, and cookbooks.
