Women Writers of the Diaspora

This page lists selected resources for the study of Women Writers of the African Diaspora. It includes links to primary texts, digital projects, online exhibits, resources on individual authors, reference sources and web portals.
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Primary Texts

• American Memory: African American History Collections
  Primary source material on prominent African American writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Zora Neale Hurston.
• African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections
  Primary source material from the Special Collections Library, Duke University. Collections include the Hannah Valentine & Lethe Jackson Slave Letters and the Vilet Lester letter.
• African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
  "A digital collection of 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg [of the New York Public Library], this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is keyword-searchable."
• Brown University Women Writers Project
  "A long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship."
• Documenting the American South
  Includes the full text (html) of documents such as Phillis Wheatley's Memoir and Poems, Octavia Rogers Albert's The House of Bondage, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and others. Search by author, title or subject to find other writers and documents.
• E-Text Center: African American
  "African American" index page from the University of Virginia's E-Text Center. Includes full texts of many writings by prominent African-American women, including Maya Angelou, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Wilson and others.

Individual Authors

• The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress
  "Presents a selection of ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her study of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling 1,068 hundred images, the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript, Music, and Rare Books and Special Collections Divisions."
• Poems of Phillis Wheatley
  Hypertext versions of three Wheatley poems, with notes and study questions. Also includes a biography of the poet and links to writings by others, such as Jupiter Hammon and Alice Walker, about Phillis Wheatley.
• The Harriet Wilson Project
  "The purpose of The Harriet Wilson Project is to raise awareness of Harriet Wilson and her literary work, to educate the public on her contribution to American history and her contribution to American literature, and to publicly honor her for her accomplishments." Site includes a short biography of Wilson, a summary of her novel, suggestions for further reading, and classroom discussion questions.

Reference Sources & Web Portals

• A Brief Chronology of African American Literature
  Includes a chronology of well-known African American writers with links to further information.
• Celebration of Women Writers
  Searchable database of women writers, useful for identifying women writers by ethnicity, nationality, and dates of birth/death. Includes links to further information for some authors.
• Modern American Poetry
  This online companion to The Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes biographies, bibliographies, and additional links for poets featured in the Anthology. Browse the list of Poets to find such authors as Gwendolyn Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, and many more.
• Selected Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
  Primary and secondary bibliographies and links to related resources for a small set of authors: Gwendolyn Bennett, Marion Cuthbert, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon-Fauset, Angelina Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Esther Popel, Anne Spencer, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
• Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color
  "Focuses on the lives and works of North American minority women artists and writers, visual artists, performance artists, musicians, sonic artists, and filmmakers. Each artist page presents biographical, critical and bibliographical information about the artist, images and quotations pertinent to her life and works, and links to other resources on the web that provide information about her, including translations and archives. The site is expanding to also include multimedia - photo collages, sonic streams, video and digital files - relevant to each artist."
• Women of Color, Women of Words
  "A site dedicated to African American women who have gifted, shaken up, and disturbed the theatre world with their powerful words." Includes biographies, extensive bibliographies, and full-text primary sources for a selected number of African American women playwrights.
• Writers of the Caribbean
  This site offers biographies, bibliographies, and links to information about some of the most prolific writers of the Caribbean. Below you will find links to information about each of the writers featured on this site. For more info on Caribbean writers you can also try George Landow's Postcolonial Web.

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