Laura Vrana
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Laura Vrana | Assistant Professor Specializes in African American literature and poetry. HUMB 254 | 460-6502 | vrana@southalabama.edu |
On leave 2022/23: Emory University Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellowship in Poetics
Articles
- "Colloquial Circulations: The Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion Public Transportation Project." College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 49.2 (Spring 2022): 202–27.
- "Genre Experiments: Thylias Moss's Slave Moth and the Poetic Neo-Slave Narrative." MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 46.2 (Summer 2021): 111-30. Winner of the 2022 MELUS Katherine Newman Best Essay Award
- "'An experiment in archive': Robin Coste Lewis's Voyage of the Sable Venus and Contemporary Black Female Poets' Conceptual Epistemologies." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 40.1 (Spring 2021): 69-94.
- "Gwendolyn Brooks' Last Quatrain: The Ballad Form and African American Anti-Lynching Poems." Journal of Ethnic American Literature 8 (Spring 2018): 7-28.
- "'soundtrack for a generational shift': Music and Innovation in Evie Shockley's the new black." Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora 41.1/41.2 (Spring 2016): 389-404.
Book Chapters
- "Anti-Lynching Poetry and the Poetics of Protest." Cambridge African American Literature in Transition, 1900-1910. Volume editor: Shirley Moody-Turner. Series editor: Joycelyn Moody. New York: Cambridge UP, 2021. 262-72.
- "Denormativizing Elegy: Historical and Transnational Journeying in Black Lives Matter Poetics." Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Editors: Emily Ruth Rutter, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott. New York: Routledge, 2019. 35-50.
Other Publications
- Amanda Johnston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Inventing Forms of Motherhood." The Fight and the Fiddle: A Quarterly Journal of the Furious Flower Poetry Center 5.3 (Spring 2022). https://fightandfiddle.
com/amanda-johnston/ . Editor: Lauren K. Alleyne. - Review, Conversations with Dana Gioia, ed. John Zheng (U of Mississippi P, 2021). Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 52.3 (Dec. 2021): 229–31.
- "Criticism and the Justification of Modernism." Review, Evan Kindley's Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Harvard UP, 2017). Journal of Modern Literature 43.4 (Summer 2020): 190-7.
- "On Brenda Marie Osbey, 'whom we have every right to love.'" Review essay, Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey (Lexington Books, 2019). The Langston Hughes Review 262. (2020): 203-215.
- "Wandering with the Lost in Elaine Terranova's Perdido." Review, Elaine Terranova's Perdido (Grid Books, 2018): Valley Voices: A Literary Review 19.1 (Spring 2019): 52-4.
- Review, Emily Ruth Rutter's Invisible Ball of Dreams: Representations of Baseball Behind the Color Line (UP of Mississippi, 2018). Studies in American Culture (Fall 2019).
- "An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey" (with Abram Foley, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, and Susan Cooke Weeber. ASAP/Journal 1.2 (June 2016): 183-98.
- Review, Anthony Reed's Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. College Language Association Journal 56.4 (June 2015): 363-6.