EBOOK
After a Thousand Tears
Poems
Georgia Douglas JohnsonSeries: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University P(0)
About
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877—1966) was the most prolific female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1877 in Atlanta, Georgia, Johnson devoted much of her artistic imagination to indexing African American women's interior life and advancing the means through which to achieve interracial cooperation. After a Thousand Tears represents the only extant poetry collection that Johnson authored between 1928 and 1962, and it illustrates her more nuanced and transgressive prescription for gender, racial, and national advancement.
Although scholars have critically examined Johnson's four previously published collections of poetry (The Heart of a Woman [1918], Bronze [1922], An Autumn Love Cycle [1928], and Share My World [1962]), they have never engaged “After a Thousand Tears”. Jimmy Worthy II located the unpublished work while conducting archival research at Emory University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Worthy discovered that while Johnson intended to publish “Tears” with Padma Publications of Bombay in 1947, the project never came to fruition. Published now, for the first time, this volume features eighty-one poems that offer Johnson's intimate and forthright sensibility toward African American women's lived experiences during and following the Harlem Renaissance.
Although scholars have critically examined Johnson's four previously published collections of poetry (The Heart of a Woman [1918], Bronze [1922], An Autumn Love Cycle [1928], and Share My World [1962]), they have never engaged “After a Thousand Tears”. Jimmy Worthy II located the unpublished work while conducting archival research at Emory University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Worthy discovered that while Johnson intended to publish “Tears” with Padma Publications of Bombay in 1947, the project never came to fruition. Published now, for the first time, this volume features eighty-one poems that offer Johnson's intimate and forthright sensibility toward African American women's lived experiences during and following the Harlem Renaissance.
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Reviews
"Jimmy Worthy II's introduction to After a Thousand Tears provides readers with a new way to understand Georgia Douglas Johnson and her poetry. In this previously unpublished and recently recovered volume, Worthy identifies a poetic presence of what he terms 'discursive veiling' and thus explores how Johnson persistently navigated contemporary racial and gender restrictions to create an open space
Judith L. Stephens-Lorenz
"This book is a welcomed daylighting of work by the prolific and profound twentieth-century writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. It is a valuable, perhaps even an invaluable, asset to scholarly communities in literature, Black studies, gender studies, history, and more."
Camille T. Dungy
"Professor Worthy's robust and sensitive re-presentation of Georgia Douglas Johnson for a new era is literary lineage making of a very high order. Long live GDJ-and this scholarly work!"
Akasha Gloria T. Hull