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Laura Vrana

Vrana Headshot

Laura Vrana | Associate Professor

Specializes in African American literature and poetry.

HUMB 254  |  460-6502  |  vrana@southalabama.edu

Pitfals of Prestige CoverPitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition. The Ohio State University Press, 2024.
PUBLISHER  USA LIBRARY

From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women's poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. Pitfalls of Prestige surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside lesser-known poets, the project both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets' works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.

Articles

  • "Tracing the Tradition of the Wheatley Poem." Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 42.3 (Summer 2024): 90-105.
  • "Monuments and Moral Memory: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetics of Reproductive Justice." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 43.1 (Spring 2024): 97-116.
  • "Duly Noted: Subversive Paratexts in Contemporary African American Poetry." Book History 27.1 (Fall 2024): 439-466.
  • "Leyla McCalla’s Lyrical Tributes to Langston Hughes." The Langston Hughes Review 29.1 (2023): 29-50.
  • "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

  • "Aesthetic Discourse and Experimentation in American Multi-Ethnic Poetics." Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Editor: Gary Totten. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Press. 210–223.
  • "Institutions and Innovations in African American Poetry of the 1980s." Cambridge African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990. Volume editors: Rich Blint, Quentin Miller, and Cassander Smith. Series editor: Joycelyn Moody. New York: Cambridge UP, 2023. 36-55.
  • "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

  • Review, Emily Ruth Rutter's Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists (U of Delaware P, 2021). MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 47.3 (Fall 2022): 202-204.
  • "The Visibility of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man." Black Lit Network Remarkable Receptions Podcast episode. Summer 2022. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & coordinated by the University of Kansas Project on the History of Black Writing. http://www.blacklitnetwork.org/remarkable-receptions.html. Available on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and Buzzsprout.
  • Biographical entry, Duriel E. Harris. Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 392: Twenty-First-Century African American Poets. New York: Gale Research, 2023. 98-108.
  • 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.