On Wednesday, April 12, for History Is Lunch Maryemma Graham discussed The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker. Twenty years in the making, the book is the first complete biography of the award-winning poet, writer, and founder of what is today the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University.
The House Where My Soul Lives offers a meticulously researched examination of a chief architect of the Black South Renaissance. Graham offers new interpretations of Walker’s prolific writing life and rejects the widely held view of her as an “angry black woman.”
“From her beloved poem ‘For My People’ and critically acclaimed novel Jubilee to her biography of Richard Wright and lawsuit against Alex Haley for plagiarism, Margaret Walker was fierce in her claim to be ‘black, female, and free,’” said Graham. “Contemporary American culture owes much to Walker for her decades of foundational work in what we know today as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the public humanities.”
“At once a radiant memorial, a clear-eyed portrait and an intellectual history, Graham's biography of writer Margaret Walker is an extraordinary study of an extraordinary woman,” wrote Paula J. Giddings, author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions.
Maryemma Graham is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983 she founded the History of Black Writing at the University of Mississippi. Since 1998 she and the History of Black Writing have been at the University of Kansas. Graham earned her BA in English and Journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her MA in English from Northwestern University, her MPS from Cornell University, and her PhD from Cornell in English. She is the author of twelve books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward Jr.
