JSU participates in 23rd national African American Read-In

De’Arbreya Lee
Staff Writer

The Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages in conjunction with the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English, came together in the sharing of African American history through literature, in the 23rd Annual African American Read-In held on February 6.

This is the 11th year Jackson State has participated in the national read-in, which was initially held on Sunday afternoons in the Jacob L. Reddix Building for one hour after church services.  This eventually changed to Mondays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and eventually became the first event to occupy the lecture room in the Dollye M.E. Robinson Liberal Arts Building.

Right on time for the start of Black History Month, the goal of this annual event is to make the celebration of African American literacy a traditional part of Black History Month activities.

“The purpose of this event is to promote African American authors and to promote African Americans to read,” said Monica Granderson, associate professor of English and Modern Foreign Language.

Granderson, who served as coordinator of the event, said with an attendance of around 600 people, the read-in was a great success.

The event, which took place from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., celebrated the many works of African Americans with the focus of Mississippi’s own 2011 National Book Award recipient, Jesmyn Ward and her second novel “Salvage the Bones”.

The De Lisle, Miss., native has used the Mississippi Gulf Coast as the setting for her two novels.  Ward was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently working as a assistant professor at the University of South Alabama.

San Francisco Chronicle writer Joan Frank in a review of “Salvage the Bones” described Ward’s novel as “often nearly unbearably painful. It is also often strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible.”

The 10 a.m. hour of the read-in highlighted the Civil Rights Movement with the novel “Minds Stayed on Freedom” by Youth of the Rural Organizing & Cultural Center (ROCC).

The young authors of the book conducted interviews of Mississippians in the Hinds County area during the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

Students in attendance of the read-in shared their thoughts of the event.

Anteigra Coleman, a sophomore political science major from Brandon, Miss., who attended that 10 a.m. hour said that she enjoyed what she learned from the panelist.

“I think that it was very interesting and I love how they let a JSU student [Albert Sykes] spread his knowledge of African American history as well as the other panelists who were apart of history themselves,” said Coleman.