Women’s History Month Display Highlights

Have you been by the Stone Center Library lately? If so, you may have noticed our latest display, which features selections in honor of women’s history month, hand-picked by Stone Center Librarian Shauna Collier.

Here are some of the highlights:

Azaransky, Sarah. The Dream Is Freedom : Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith. Oxford ;: Oxford UP, c2011.

Blair, Cynthia M. I’ve Got to Make My Livin’ : Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-century Chicago. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

Haynes, Rosetta Renae. Radical Spiritual Motherhood : Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-century African American Women. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, c2011.

Johnson, M. Mikell. Heroines of African American Golf : The Past, the Present and the Future. [Bloomington, Ind.]: Trafford Pub., c2010.

Lau, Kimberly J. Body Language : Sisters in Shape, Black Women’s Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple UP, 2011.

Musser, Judith. “Girl, Colored” and Other Stories : A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in the Crisis Magazine, 1910-2010. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., c2011.

Nevergold, Barbara Seals., and Peggy Brooks-Bertram. Go, Tell Michelle : African American Women Write to the New First Lady. Albany, N.Y.: Excelsior Editions/State U of New York P, c2009.

Perkins-Valdez, Dolen. Wench : A Novel. New York: Amistad, c2010.

Shields, John C., and Eric D. Lamore. New Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, c2011.

Winn, Maisha T. Girl Time : Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-prison Pipeline. New York: Teachers College P, c2011.

Like what you see? Come on by for these titles and more! The Stone Center Library is open 8am-8pm Monday-Thursday and Fridays 8am-5pm. The Library is on the third floor of the Stone Center on South Rd., near the Belltower.

From UNC-CH’s Rare Book Collection: New Acquisitions!

Last week, in recognition of Black History Month, UNC’s own Rare Book Collection blogged about two of their recent acquisitions:

Christina Moody’s Tiny Spark: “Imagine a sixteen-year old African-American girl publishing a book of poetry in 1910: some of it in dialect, some of it provocatively proud of her race, grappling with serious issues – like how a Negro can pledge allegiance to the American flag – as well as the problems of ‘Chillun and Men.'”

AND

Claude McKay’s Long Way From Home: “The volume is the autobiography of the Jamaica-born writer McKay in the first edition, published in New York in 1937. Its original cloth cover with foil label is quite worn, but open up, and there’s a surprise, a wonderful page of inscriptions, one from the author to Naomi Davis, the alias of Frances Daniels.”

For more on these great finds, be sure to click on the links above for the full blog posts!

Spring Break Hours! Reduced Schedule: March 5 – March 9

Spring Break is just around the corner! Next week, the Stone Center Library will be operating on a reduced schedule, so please be sure to plan accordingly:

**Spring Break Schedule: March 5 – March 9, 2012**

Monday – Friday	8 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday	CLOSED
Sunday	CLOSED

Working on midterms and projects? Thinking ahead to final papers? Don’t forget to make use of not only the Library, but our blog archives, for inspiration as well as fun reads. Not sure where to start? Here are a few suggestions: 

• Researching a particular topic? Peruse posts on tags such as women’s history, civil rights, online resources, and more!
• Looking for something new to read? Try New @the SCL.
• Trying to broaden your reading list? Check out our Boredom Busters series, inaugurated last summer with 20 picks for the month of July.

We will be open regular hours this week and encourage those of you on campus to make use of our group study rooms, lovely carrels, and well-lit study area. Can’t make it to the library? Our chat buddy name is StoneCenterRef or contact Stone Center Librarian Shauna Collier at shauna.collier@unc.edu for an in-person consultation.

SCL Picks: Oscars Edition

The 84th annual Academy Awards will take place this Sunday and among this year’s contenders is The Help, which has been nominated for four awards, including nods for Viola Davis (Best Actress) and Octavia Spencer (Best Supporting Actress). This film takes place in 1960s Mississippi and chronicles the intersecting lives of white women and their African-American maids against the backdrop of major social upheaval nationwide. Of course, before it was an Oscar-nominated film, The Help was a best-selling book, as reviewed by Stone Center Librarian Shauna Collier in a previous SCL blog post, and available here at the Library.

Interested in learning more about African Americans and the film industry? Here, in no particular order, are ten titles to get you started:

• African Americans and the Oscar : decades of struggle and achievement
• Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of Black Hollywood
• We gotta have it : twenty years of seeing Black at the movies, 1986-2006
• Historical dictionary of African American cinema
• Screens fade to black : contemporary African American cinema
• Black magic : White Hollywood and African American culture
• Blackface : reflections on African-Americans and the movies
• Toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks : an interpretive history of Blacks in American films
• Reel racism : confronting Hollywood’s construction of Afro-American culture
• Mammies no more : the changing image of Black women on stage and screen

The books listed above are but a sampling of related items available here at the Stone Center Library. Come by and check us out!

New @the SCL, Part 1: Literature & Literary Studies!

If you’ve been by the Stone Center Library lately, you may have noticed some great new books on display. If not, here’s the first of three posts highlighting some recent acquisitions in literature and literary studies available here at the SCL:

Juice: a Novel (Ishmael Reed)

Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West meets East (Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani)

Salvage the Bones: A Novel (Jesmyn Ward) — 2011 National Book Award winner!

Authentic Blackness / Real Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (edited by Martin Japtok and Jerry Rafiki Jenkins)

Conversations with Walter Mosley (Edited by Owen E. Brady)

Wench: a Novel (Dolen Perkins-Valdez)

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell)

“Girl, Colored” and Other Stories: A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in The Crisis Magazine, 1910-2010 (Edited by Judith Musser)

Stay tuned for more new titles in dance, religion, politics, and more!

Walter Dean Myers named new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature

As of today, author Walter Dean Myers is officially the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Established in 2008, “The National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature raises national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to lifelong literacy, education and the development and betterment of the lives of young people.”

Last week, several newspapers published interviews with Myers, whose slogan for this two-year appointment is “Reading Is Not Optional.” Here are a few excerpts from the New York Times article by Julie Bosman:

“As an African-American man who dropped out of high school but built a successful writing career — largely because of his lifelong devotion to books — Mr. Myers said his message would be etched by his own experiences.”

“The choice of Mr. Myers represents a departure from his predecessors and is likely to be seen as a bold statement. His books chronicle the lives of many urban teenagers, especially young, poor African-Americans. While his body of work includes poetry, nonfiction and the occasional cheerful picture book for children, its standout books offer themes aimed at young-adult readers: stories of teenagers in violent gangs, soldiers headed to Iraq and juvenile offenders imprisoned for their crimes.”

“While many young-adult authors shy away from such risky subject material, Mr. Myers has used his books to confront the darkness and despair that fill so many children’s lives.”

(Source: NYT: “Children’s Book Envoy Defines His Mission”)

 

NEW SCL DISPLAY!

Have you been by the Stone Center Library lately? If so, you’ve hopefully noticed our new display:

Our latest selection of recently acquired books features titles related to African Americans in American culture, in keeping with our recent event with UNC history professor “Fitz” Brundage:

• Beyond blackface : African Americans and the creation of American popular culture, 1890-1930
• A renaissance in Harlem : lost voices of an American community
• Fly away : the great African American cultural migrations
• Rereading the Harlem renaissance : race, class, and gender in the fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West
• The Regal Theater and black culture
• Representing African Americans in transatlantic abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy
• Black culture and the New Deal : the quest for civil rights in the Roosevelt era
• Reflections on blaxploitation : actors and directors speak
• Decoded
• It’s bigger than hip-hop : the rise of the post-hip-hop generation

All titles are available here at the library and we encourage you to come by and check them out. Happy reading, and have a great weekend!