East Stroudsburg University is pleased to announce that Artress Bethany White, Ph.D., associate professor of English, has recently been published.
Dr. White is the co-editor of a book titled Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters, published by Pangyrus and currently available for purchase.
Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters celebrates the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s extraordinary poetry collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by inviting 20 award-winning Black female poets to reimagine the work of this iconic literary ancestor in original poems meant for a new generation.
Phillis Wheatley Peters has been characterized in many ways over the years, including: the young African girl enslaved by Boston’s Wheatley family in 1761, the acclaimed 18th-century transcontinental poet, and the first Black woman to publish a collection of poems in America. Today her work serves as a foundational text of an expansive African American literary cannon.
For this anthology, acclaimed and award-winning poets were asked to artistically interpret a Wheatley Peters poem and provide a brief craft essay or statement documenting their process for reinscribing the historical work. Each poet’s contribution consists of a brief essay, a new poem, and the original Wheatley poem that has inspired the new work.
This project was conceived of by Dr. White and co-editor, Danielle Legros Georges, to help make Wheatley Peters’s important work better known, and more accessible to the 21st-century lay reader. Poet contributors include the volume editors and Tracy K. Smith, Gabrielle Civil, Florence Ladd, Janice A. Lowe, Kiki Petrosino, Aracelis Girmay, Donika Kelly, Tara Betts, L’Merchie Frazier, Yalie Saweda Kamara, Tsitsi Jaji, Shara McCallum, Mahogany L. Browne, Pamela Mordecai, Rosamond S. King, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Sharan Strange, and Evie Shockley.
For more information about the book contact Dr. White by email at awhite43@esu.edu.