How I Met the Reclusive Georgia O’Keeffe (The New Yorker)

October 1, 2020

"And so I began the project. I did much of the archival research at the Beinecke Library, at Yale, which holds the vast O’Keeffe-Stieglitz archive. There, I worked in tranquil silence within the alabaster walls, leafing through papers and photographs; reading long, chatty, private, serious, funny, heartfelt, and thoughtful letters; learning a complicated network of kinship, friendships, and professional relationships. I enjoyed those times enormously."

Carrie Langston: An Important Suffragist Everyone Should Know (Washington Informer)

September 30, 2020

Workshop inspired creative expression in cellblocks

September 24, 2020

When a student named Justin wrote pieces for a creative writing workshop offered by the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) this summer, he felt like he was sharing his heart with the world. The workshop, which was offered to inmates at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institute in Suffield, Connecticut, made him feel his heart was “treated as a heart should be,” Justin said.

A joy glimpsed: Introducing an unpublished story by Edith Wharton (TLS)

September 18, 2020

“The Children’s Hour”, which has remained unpublished until now, charts an afternoon in the life of a Catholic priest.

With festival cancelled, Windham-Campbell Prizes find new ways to celebrate

September 11, 2020

In a typical year, the 2020 recipients of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes would visit campus this month for a three-day festival to share their work and celebrate the written word with the local community. With this year’s festival cancelled due to the pandemic, the prize’s organizers have found a new way to honor the eight recipients and their craft. The celebration will instead combine an original lecture by a legendary writer with a special edition of one of the country’s most prestigious literary journals. Renowned science fiction author and literary critic Samuel R. Delany will deliver a keynote address as was originally planned. His lecture, based on the theme “Why I Write,” will be presented online on Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 5 p.m. ET

Libraries open to students on campus and across the globe (Yale Daily News)

September 3, 2020

Students studying remotely, though unable to use library spaces, have access to nearly all library materials through various services provided by the University. Once COVID-19 cases spiked in the spring, library staff began digitizing thousands of library resources that can be easily accessed online. They have scanned over 20,000 images in the last month from the Beinecke Library alone, according to Beinecke Director Edwin Schroeder.

"New to the world" Talking to Leonard Marcus '72, a scholar of children’s books.

September 1, 2020

After our May/June and July/August issues reported at length on the pandemic and dissected the brutality of racism, we at the Yale Alumni Magazine dearly wanted to deliver something more joyful. COVID-19, let alone racism, won’t disappear soon; we’ll be coming back to those subjects. But for September/October, we turned to children’s books. As Leonard Marcus ’72 told me—and we at the magazine have embraced the concept for this issue—“Children’s smiling is relevant to getting through a crisis.”

Lola Hayes and "Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music" (WNYC)

August 31, 2020

The November 29th program considered "the musical setting of poems by Langston Hughes and included the bard himself. "Langston Hughes was guest of honor and punctuated his interview with a reading from his opera Troubled Island."[2] The original Hughes-annotated WNYC script is below.

Hoods in My Hymnal (Oxford American)

August 25, 2020

Ishould’ve known the Ku Klux Klan would pop up. Not only was I in Tennessee, where racism punctuates our historical narrative, but this was Lawrenceburg, some scant eighteen miles from Pulaski, the Klan’s birthplace. And the Lawrenceburg folks had been some of the first to join in terrorizing African Americans, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. Still, sitting in the Crockett Theater on a prickly velvet seat surrounded by 1,049 Southern gospel quartet fans, I thought the Klan would stay safely out of this essay. Yes, I thought I could avoid talking about racism even knowing that the “Southern” in Southern gospel is a euphemism for white. The librarian had ended that naiveté. One Google search later, I found my first evidence he was right: a piece of digitized sheet music in Yale’s Beinecke Library.