Yale Collection of American Literature

The Yale Collection of American Literature documents the creative lives, the artistic communities, and the literary achievements of American writers. The collectionis noted for its strength in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century poetry, fiction, and dramatic writings. The archives of writers of diverse backgrounds underscore the collection’s interest in the indigenous and immigrant cultures that shape American literature.

  • Suffragist, Activist, Journalist: The Incredible Life of Jersey City’s Own Ella Barksdale Brown (The Hoboken Girl)

    February 27, 2023

    Her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Circle for Negro War Relief, the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, and the National Association of Colored Women led to her friendships with such pioneering civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson. Archive boxes in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hold letters of well wishes, sympathy, news, and greetings between Ella and her illustrious peers.

  • Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry (Connecticut Public Radio)

    February 22, 2023

    Yale University has announced that Joy Harjo is the winner of the 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry. The biennial prize is awarded to an American poet for the best book of poems published in the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Harjo won on both counts—for her book Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. This after being U.S. Poet Laureate between 2019 and 2022.

  • Festival encourages writers of all stripes (The Beacon)

    February 21, 2023

    As part of this year’s CityLit Festival, Joy Harjo (left), the winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a reading of her poetry and conversing with a local poet on Tuesday, March 28, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater.

  • Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe collection (CT Public Radio)

    February 15, 2023

    A selection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s personal recipe collection is on display at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. We talk with its curator about what the iconic American artist was cooking and eating when she wasn’t painting giant flowers, skulls, and landscapes.

  • Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)

    February 8, 2023

    On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.

  • A COMPOSITIONAL COLLABORATION(?) BETWEEN MARGARET BONDS AND FLORENCE PRICE: “Sleep Song” (Medium)

    January 20, 2023

    And it’s how we know that Florence B. Price had a hand in producing the only surviving exemplar of Margaret Bonds’s earliest surviving choral work: the Sleep Song for women’s chorus and piano, recently published by Hildegard Publishing Company as part of their ongoing Margaret Bonds Signature Series. That undated manuscript is held among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 8, folder 41), as are the three autographs for the solo version of Sleep Song. The latter all identify Margaret Bonds as a member of ASCAP, which Bonds joined as a non-participating member in 1952, and of which she became a full member in 1955.

  • How Janet Malcolm Created Her Own Personal Archive (LitHub)

    January 18, 2023

    It’s hardly coincidental that Malcolm was organizing her own archive around the same time that she began to explore writing about her life. In 2013, she sent her first shipment—59 boxes of assorted detritus—up to New Haven, where they would live at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To say that Malcolm organized her papers would be a stretch. In some cases, she simply emptied the contents of her filing cabinets into cardboard boxes. But elsewhere, she annotated letters and folders, leaving easter eggs and reminders for any future researcher that she was thinking carefully about what to include in her archive and, more importantly, what to leave out.

  • Campus events honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 10, 2023

    The Yale and New Haven communities will commemorate the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during a series of campus events, including a keynote address by his eldest son, Martin Luther King III. The campus celebrations, which also will include library exhibits highlighting King’s contributions, a poetry slam, an exploration of King’s influence on environmental justice, and a love march, are part of the university’s annual campus commemoration of the famed civil rights activist and preacher.