Launched in Fall 2024, the Digital Project Graduate Fellowship supports independent graduate research in the digital humanities. This new opportunity is open to all graduate students currently enrolled in the MSU Department of English, with the goal of fostering innovative, interdisciplinary projects that engage digital methods, tools, and theories. Each spring semester, one fellow will be selected to receive a $500 research award to support the development of a digital humanities project.
Female poets formed an essential cadre of the Harlem Renaissance; much of their work stayed within small press publications as well as anthologies published during that era rarely included in contemporary canons. This map gathers the threads of their poetry and lives together to visualize the life of each poet.
The map traces the birthplace and final resting place as well as where in the United States they were working during their literary contributions during the Harlem Renaissance. The map illustrates where and when these poets lived and worked and helps to fill out parts of the Harlem Renaissance story that has been obscured. A geographic and historical mapping of their lives and literary work is one step towards recovering new facets of this era in American history.
Various icons represent different events in the poets’ lives. The home symbol relates to places where they were born, lived, and died. The graduation cap represents places where they attended school. The book signifies locations where they worked. The ring is a symbol of where poets were married. The single music symbol shows the music company where Gwendolyn Bennett worked. The monument symbol is where Anne Spencer’s grave is — a place anyone can visit to this day.
What this map uncovers is the extensive movement the majority of the poets experienced over their lifetimes. With the exception of Anne Spencer all the women moved quite frequently and few were settled in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, rather they participated in the movement from other geographic locales and connected with the epicenter of cultural production through networks of relationships and publications. When thinking about relational connections within the black community at this time we see that spatial commonality mattered less than a shared desire to create and produce art.
April D. Best is a PhD student in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She received her BA in English and French and her B.Ed. from York University. She obtained her MA in Literature from Grand Valley State University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, environmental policy, transnational feminisms, digital humanities, feminist theory, environmental humanities, and Indigenous and Black feminisms.