Writing in Black:
Black Bibliography,
Black Biography
Call for Proposals
DUE NOVEMBER 27
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
February 19, 2027
About
From the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth, Black writers used print to claim authorship, citizenship, and a place in the historical record. But the record itself had to be made, and remaking it has remained an ongoing act. This conference brings together historians, literary scholars, and book historians to study Black writing of this earlier period alongside the practice of Black bibliography as it has been carried out both then and now: the work, past and present, of deciding whose words get preserved, catalogued, and read as history.
Biography and bibliography are usually treated as separate scholarly practices, the first narrative, the second archival. This conference treats them as linked acts of representation. To write a Black biography is to make a claim about whose life is worth telling. To compile a Black bibliography, in any era, is to make a claim about whose words are worth preserving. Both acts depend on the physical apparatus of print: the printer’s case, the subscription list, the catalog, the typeface itself, whether set in 1830 or designed today.
Held at the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s oldest repositories of early Black print, this conference draws on collections that make these questions concrete. Sessions will pair scholarly papers on early Black writing with conversations about the continuing labor of bibliography, asking public and academic audiences to consider print not just as a record of Black lives but as a practice, still ongoing, of making that record at all.
Headlining Speakers:
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Tiya Miles, public historian, academic historian, creative writer, and professor at Harvard University; Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021) and Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (2024)
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Jennifer Brody, professor of performance, aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies and contemporary cultural studies at Stanford University; author of the recently published Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis (2026)
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Nicholas Boggs, writer, independent scholar, and professor at Stony Brook University; New York Times bestselling author of Baldwin: A Love Story (2025)
Conference Format
Unlike a traditional academic conference, Writing in Black is designed for a broad public audience. To maximize engagement and accessibility, each speaker is invited to build a 10–15 minute presentation around a single source: a text, image, or object that illuminates how a Black life has been written, recorded, or preserved.
This may be:
- An excerpt from a text-based source, such as:
- A biography, memoir, or autobiographical narrative
- Letters, diaries, or personal correspondence
- A bibliography, catalog, subscription list, or index
- Newspapers, periodicals, or obituaries
- Legal, church, or genealogical records
- An extract from a visual or material source, such as:
- Photographs or portraits
- Broadsides, book covers, or printed ephemera
- Typefaces, type specimens, or printers’ materials
- Artwork, memorabilia, or other objects that document a life
By focusing on one source, we aim to provide attendees with copies when possible, so the audience can read alongside you and see the material process by which a life becomes a record. Our goal is to move away from a series of lectures and toward a shared experience of how biography and bibliography are actually made.
We welcome submissions of any text, image, or object, so long as it is authored by, about, or preserved by Black people, and opens up questions of how Black lives are written, catalogued, and remembered.
Building a bibliography together.
Each accepted speaker will be asked to submit their chosen source in advance. We will use these submissions to generate a QR code for each presentation, so attendees can access the source in real time during the talk and take it with them afterward. Collectively, these sources will form a bibliography of the conference itself: a public, citable record of Black lives and the materials used to write them, created by the very act of holding this conference.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit:
- A brief proposal (250 words) describing your chosen source and the argument you’ll build around it
- A short speaker bio (100 words)
- An image or copy of the source itself, if available.
Deadline for submissions: November 27, 2026
Accepted speakers will be notified by late December.