Monthly Archives: February 2021

Alicia D. Williams Tells the Story of Zora Neale Hurston

February 22, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Charlotte author Alicia D. Williams burst on the children’s literature scene in 2019 with the publication of her debut novel, Genesis Begins Again.  She received both a Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Author Award for New Talent for this novel.  Following the success of her first book, she stepped away from her teaching position and focused her attention on her burgeoning writing career. 

Last month, Atheneum Books for Young Readers released her second book, a picture book biography of folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston.  Titled Jump at the Sun:  The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston, this picture book is already garnering rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and several other national magazines and journals.  For more information about Williams and her books, please click on the following link:  https://www.aliciadwilliams.com/

In Jump at the Sun, Williams shows how Hurston’s experiences growing up in Eatonville, Florida, during the 1890s shaped her interest in African American folklore and sparked her love of storytelling.  Williams focuses much of the book on Hurston’s childhood and early adulthood, but she touches on Hurston’s career as a folklorist, anthropologist and professional writer.   As several reviewers have noted, the book has a lively, joyful tone that is matched by Jacqueline Alcántara’s vibrant and energetic illustrations.   The book also includes memorable lines from some of the tales that Hurston published in her folktale collections, such as Mules and Men.

In her “Author’s Note” that comes at the end of Jump at the Sun, Williams recalls her introduction to Hurston: “I remember when I first met Zora.  I was in college, studying in the library.  My friend, only a table over, giggled and giggled.  She’d get quiet and then giggle again.  Finally, I got up from my seat to find out what was so funny.  She held up a book by Zora Neale Hurston.  And she later gifted me the anthology I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive.”  As Williams tells it, this book became one of her treasures.  She found in Hurston an author she loved but also a role model of sorts.  Like Hurston, Williams has a passion for storytelling.  Her new career as a children’s author is an outgrowth of her many years of experience as a storyteller and performer. 

Williams recently told a writer from Folklife that one of her goals in writing Jump at the Sun is to introduce children to the joys that come with sharing folktales. As she put it, “I want this whole engagement of bringing back the storytelling and oral traditions and sharing them and having fun with them.”  By introducing children to Hurston’s contributions as a collector and teller of stories, Williams hopes to encourage children to follow the advice that Hurston heard from her mother: “Jump at de sun.  You might not land on de sun, but at least you’d get off do ground.”  As we celebrate Black History Month here in Storied Charlotte, this sounds like timely advice that we should all make an effort to follow.   

Tags: African American folklorefolklorist

Charlotte Lit Turns Five

February 15, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

My sister, Anna, was born on my second birthday. When my parents brought Anna home from the hospital, they introduced me to her and told me that Anna was my birthday present. According to my parents, I responded by saying, “But I wanted a truck.” Well, I soon got over getting a sister instead of a truck. As we grew up together, I came to enjoy sharing a birthday with my sister.  We each had our own birthday party, but we also celebrated together. Our shared birthday is one of the many things that bonds us. I feel the same way about sharing an anniversary with Charlotte Lit. A year ago this week, I launched my Storied Charlotte blog, and five years ago this week, the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, more commonly known as Charlotte Lit, made its public debut.

My Storied Charlotte blog and Charlotte Lit are both rooted in Charlotte’s community of readers and writers, and both celebrate authors from Charlotte. For example, in my first Storied Charlotte blog post, I wrote about Carson McCullers and her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which she started writing a block from where I live. Similarly, one of Charlotte Lit’s first major initiatives was a year-long celebration McCullers and her connections to Charlotte. Charlotte Lit, however, is a far bigger enterprise than my blog. It sponsors classes, writing workshops, poetry readings, book launches, and many more events and programs. For more information about Charlotte Lit, please click on the following link: https://www.charlottelit.org/about/

I recently contacted Paul Reali, a co-founder and Operations Manager of Charlotte Lit, and asked him for more information about Charlotte Lit’s first five years. Here is what he sent to me:

Charlotte Lit’s genesis story arises directly from myth. Or, at least, from the seeds of one woman’s love of myth. In 2014, after two years of solitary work completing her dissertation for a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies, poet Kathie Collins decided she’d reached the end of her ability to toil away in isolation.

She imagined a creative co-op, a place for writers and other creatives to work together in community. So, she set out with her dream––and a few pieces of furniture cast off from the bonus room where her college-aged kids had once gathered round a shared desktop and the family TV––and found affordable space in a repurposed CMS school building in Plaza Midwood. The old classroom, in what is now known the Midwood International and Cultural Center, had charm—natural light from tall windows, hardwood floors, and a pencil sharpener bolted to the wall.

Kathie was hoping for six or eight writers to join and share the rent—but the only one to sign on was me. I’m a self-employed corporate trainer who at the time was scaling back that business in order to develop my writing practice. Soon we started thinking about what we might do with this great space we had. We held a few “creative conversations” that drew a couple dozen people and we knew we were onto something. We started thinking about teaching classes, and other ways to bring writers and readers together.

One day in the summer of 2015 I got a text from Kathie. She’d been walking and a phrase had come into her head: Charlotte Center for Literary Arts. “That’s what we’re building,” she wrote.

We gathered a focus group and asked the key questions: what could this thing be, and do we need it here? We incorporated in October 2015 and spent the next few months shaping the org before launching on February 19, 2016, with an event called “Light the Night.” More than 100 people joined us for the opening, headlined by poet Linda Pastan and graciously hosted by our Midwood Center neighbor the Light Factory in their gallery. Most of that evening’s guests immediately became Charlotte Lit members, and many have been with us ever since. We now have more than 200 annual membership subscribers and reach more than 1,500 people each year. It turns out the community did need Charlotte Lit; one of the more gratifying things we hear is “we didn’t know we needed this until you created it.”

We’ve experimented with different offerings during our five years. (We’re rife with ideas, and not afraid to try things and see what sticks.) A number of those offerings remain core to the organization. We’re probably best known for our craft classes, but we also have a strong following for the many lit-based talks, readings, and conversations open to the public. Each year we hold about 100 classes, half of them free, and all classes have available scholarships. We have a multi-year program for book writers called Authors Lab. And we occasionally do big events, such as a year-long series in 2017 to honor Carson McCullers, who began writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter here in the 1930s and who shares our February 19 birthday, and our NC Arts Council-supported 2019 community-wide Beautiful Truth personal story-telling initiative. One of our most visible ongoing public programs is the 4X4CLT quarterly poetry+art poster series curated by Lisa Zerkle. This program matches a nationally known poet with a local artist, resulting in four beautiful posters being displayed all over the county, and a public reading by the poet which always draws 50-100 people.

Five years down the road, we’re proud to now be included in the list of Charlotte arts organizations receiving operational funding from the ASC. As much as we’ve grown and accomplished, however, connecting people—writers and readers—to one another remains at the heart of all we do. Kathie had community in mind when she first walked through the Midwood Center’s doors, and community has been part of Charlotte Lit’s mission ever since. Not coincidentally, we now have two classrooms in the Midwood Center, one of which is available daily to our members as an inviting place to practice their craft “in community,” just as Kathie first imagined. We’re looking forward to having both classrooms open full-time again in the fall, and keeping the Charlotte Lit story going.

I thank Kathie Collins, Paul Reali and the many other people associated with Charlotte Lit for all of their contributions to Storied Charlotte, and I enthusiastically wish Charlotte Lit a happy fifth birthday. Although I can’t provide everybody with a truck as a birthday present, I can offer a quotation by Robert Crumb: “Keep on truckin’!”

Fannie Flono: Award-Winning Journalist Turned Historian of the Black Experience in Charlotte

February 08, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Fannie Flono and I both arrived in Charlotte in 1984.  She came to pursue a career as a journalist with The Charlotte Observer, and I came to pursue a career as an English professor at UNC Charlotte.  In 1993, she became an associate editor, a position she held until her retirement from the paper in 2014.  In this capacity, she regularly wrote columns, many of which focused on the African American community in Charlotte.  I always read her columns, and I appreciated how she often included historical information and insights in these op-ed pieces.  Now that I occasionally write guest columns for the paper, I make an effort to follow Fannie’s example and ground my columns in history.  

Fannie’s interest in African American history led her to write Thriving in the Shadows:  The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which the Novello Festival Press published in 2006.  For anyone who is interested in the history of Brooklyn and Charlotte’s other Black neighborhoods, Fannie’s book is indispensable.  It includes more than 100 archival photographs, and it features excerpts from oral history interviews that Fannie conducted with prominent members of Charlotte’s Black community.  Fannie’s book along with Tom Hanchett’s Sorting Out the New South City provide readers with an understanding and appreciation of the story of African Americans in Charlotte.

Since her retirement in 2014, Fannie has remained interested in the history of Black communities in the Charlotte area.  She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees for the Charlotte Museum of History (CMH), and she is leading CMH’s campaign to preserve an abandoned schoolhouse where Black children studied during the Jim Crow era.  Mary Newsom, a free-lance writer who worked with Fannie for more than 20 years at The Charlotte Observer, serves with Fannie on the CMH Board of Trustees.  Mary sent me the following statement about Fannie’s efforts to save this historic schoolhouse:

You couldn’t find a more fitting person than Fannie Flono to spearhead the Charlotte Museum of History’s campaign to rescue an abandoned, century-old rural schoolhouse built during Jim Crow segregation.  Fannie has been a trustee at the museum for more than a decade, with a special passion for telling the stories of the past, especially the Black community stories that mainstream history has slighted. One example among many is the Siloam Schoolhouse, built as part of a vast but almost-forgotten initiative called Rosenwald Schools. More than a century ago, Julius Rosenwald, CEO of Sears and son of Jewish immigrants, partnered with Black educator Booker T. Washington to build schools for the descendants of formerly enslaved laborers in the South. North Carolina had more Rosenwald Schools than any other state, and Mecklenburg had 24. Siloam is one, a dilapidated relic of a now-forgotten community in rural northeast Mecklenburg, an area now called University City. The museum intends to raise $1 million to move the school to the museum and restore it to tell the story of community resilience and persistence. Thanks to Fannie’s efforts, with help from many others, the Save Siloam School campaign is more than a third of the way to its goal.

As a journalist with The Charlotte Observer, as the author of Thriving in the Shadows, and as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Charlotte Museum of History, Fannie Flono has contributed in numerous ways to our understanding of the history of African Americans in Storied Charlotte.  I think that an excellent way to celebrate Black History Month in Charlotte would be to bring back into print Fannie’s Thriving in the Shadows:  The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. 

Tags: Black communitiesCharlotte African American community

Celebrating the History of Black Studies at UNC Charlotte

February 01, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

In keeping with the fact that February is Black History Month,  journalist Vanessa Gallman, a Charlotte native and former reporter for The Charlotte Observer, has just brought out a book that deals with the origins of the Black Studies Program at UNC Charlotte in the 1970s.  Titled Who Am I? Memoirs of a Transformative Black Studies Program, this book has deep personal connections for Vanessa.  She started her undergraduate education at UNC Charlotte in 1972, and she was one of the students who participated in the Black Studies Program during its formative years. 

Vanessa eventually transferred to UNC Chapel Hill, where she earned a journalism degree, but she remained in touch with the students and faculty members she met through her participation in UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program.  In preparation for editing her book, she reached out to them and requested that they send her their recollections about the program’s early days.  She then compiled these memories in her book.  For more detailed information about the book, please click on the following link:  https://store.bookbaby.com/bookshop/book/index.aspx?bookURL=Who-am-I5

I recently contacted Vanessa and asked her about the origins of her book.  Here is what she sent to me:

“Who am I?” was the first question UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Program led students to explore in order to achieve excellence on campus and in life. Such soul-searching was essential for the first wave of students who desegregated universities during a time of racial turbulence. 

Now five decades later, the 50 students who contributed memoirs to this book point to the courses, teachers or just the program’s existence as key influences in their lives.  The book is the brainchild of Dr. Bertha Maxwell Roddey, the first director of the program that is now called the Department of Africana Studies. She and the other professors were instrumental in my development as a person and as a journalist. 

While the project is not an academic exploration, I hope readers would find it intriguing that student protesters worked with receptive administrators, such as the late Bonnie Cone, to create the groundbreaking program.  Despite challenges and real fears, students were determined to fulfill the mission of integration. For those of us who participated in this early ethnic studies program, it provided us with the knowledge and tools to navigate the world at large.  I am struck that some of the themes of past protest still echo in current student activism.

Who Am I? Memoirs of a Transformative Black Studies Program is a celebration of self-awakening, racial pride and teacher appreciation, as well a glimpse into a pivotal point in UNC Charlotte history.

Vanessa’s new book serves as an excellent reminder that history is not just something that happens somewhere else.  As we celebrate Black History Month, we should remember that Charlotte has a rich history and that African Americans figure prominently in this history.  Vanessa and the contributors to her book provide us with a timely account of how Storied Charlotte came to be home of one the nation’s first academic programs in Black Studies. 

Tags: Black HistoryBlack Studies