Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her first book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016) examines early black newspapers, slave narratives, advice columns and etiquette books to tell a literary history of black girlhood from the 1820’s to the early twentieth century. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award.

Dr. Wright was in residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow to complete research on her second book, Literary Legacies: Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries. “My second book traces the influence of libraries and historical repositories on the literary careers and enduring legacies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century African American women writers. I consider how private and public libraries functioned as gateways to African American women’s literary authority and explore how black women navigated these institutions that often rendered them invisible.”  The second book examines how the histories of black women writers are often “buried” in literary forms less likely to be studied, such as autograph albums due to outdated finding aids or minimally processed or non-digitized collections. To preserve their legacies, black women writers are selecting specific repositories to house their papers while they are living. “My year in residence as an NEH/PAAH Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia was an invaluable opportunity that all scholars of early African American literature and history should experience.”

You can purchase Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century at https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54fkh7kt9780252040573.html

A recipient of the 2017/2018 Mellon Scholars Research Fellowship Program and a National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow,  Dr. Nazera S. Wright, Department of English, University of Kentucky, African American Women Writers and Research Libraries