November 2009--Volume VIII, Issue 11

This November, celebrate breakthroughs in African-American writing, particularly in the world of drama. Alice Childress, who went on to receive acclaim as an author and playwright, was the first African-American woman to win an Obie Award for her play Trouble in Mind on November 29, 1955. Also, on November 26, 1970, Charles Gordone became the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for his off-Broadway play, No Place to Be Somebody. 

Breakthroughs
Other breakthroughs to consider include the rise of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to international prominence in the late 1800s, a movement documented in Toni P. Anderson’s Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus: The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers and Christian Reconstruction, 1871-1878. Headway of another kind is represented in Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, which examines the impact of Barack Obama’s presidential victory on the political landscape.