CFP: New Essays on the Work of EDWARD P. JONES. Nov. 1, 2010 (abstracts, early submissions); March 20, 2011 (completed articles)
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Submissions are now being sought for the first ever collection of essays on the life and work of Edward P. Jones. The collection, entitled Edward P. Jones: New Essays, will be published in the second half of 2011.
Essays should take the form of full-length scholarly articles approximately 5,000 words in length, and may be submitted either in full (if already completed or nearing completion) or provisionally as 500-word abstracts outlining the central thesis of a proposed article. Longer articles will receive consideration, but contributors who wish to submit such articles should first send a brief query to epjessays@gmail.com.
All submissions should be emailed as DOC, DOCX, or RTF attachments to epjessays@gmail.com along with any enquiries about the nature of the publication. Citations in all completed articles should be formatted using endnotes in accordance with the guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Scholarly articles may be developed from material already written — conference papers and lectures, or a thesis or dissertation — but all submissions will be judged solely on their merits as scholarly articles, so that conference papers and theses must be adapted to suit the article format. Submissions are welcome from anyone working at any level of academia (or independently, outside the academy) as long as they display scholarly sophistication. All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed and thoroughly edited prior to publication.
The closing date for abstract submissions is November 1, 2010. The closing date for drafts of essays suitable for peer review is March 20, 2011.
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ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
The aim of this collection is to make amends for the current absence of any satisfying scholarly coverage of the Jones oeuvre, and thus to make the first attempt to provide coverage to as much of that oeuvre as possible. To that end, scholarly articles may take any approach to any of the three books that Jones has so far published — two collections of short fiction, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006), as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World (2003) — and articles may also consider any of Jones' more occasional writings: his literary criticism, his interviews, his biographical sketches, his editorial notes, and so on. These include, but are not limited to:
- 'A Sunday Portrait' (a brief biography of Jones' mother) published in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography edited by Deborah Wills. New York: New Press/W.W. Norton & Co., 1994.
- An introduction to New Stories From the South: The Year's Best — 2007, which Jones also edited. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007.
- An introduction to the 2008 republication of Black Boy by Richard Wright (1966). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.
- An introduction to Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril edited by Kevin Merida. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.
- Edward P. Jones on Writing in Ambergris 10 (1994) edited by Mark Kissling.
- The PEN/Hemingway Prize Keynote Address (2007) published in
The Hemingway Review 27.1 (Fall 2007): 7-13. - A series of interviews available online, with links at the end of this CFP.
In addition to the Pulitzer win, Jones' work has also been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award (twice) and has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award, among others. Jones himself has been the recipient of both an NEA Grant and a Macarthur 'Genius' Grant, and currently holds a position teaching creative writing at George Washington University in his hometown of Washington, DC. Yet despite the critical acclaim and accolades that Jones has received, there does not yet exist a volume of criticism devoted solely to his work. Ideally, the volume to be published in 2011 will honor Jones' work both by bringing it to the attention of readers unfamiliar with it and by providing future critics with a single resource to which they can refer when writing about Jones in years to come.
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INTERVIEWS WITH EDWARD P. JONES
A number of interviews with Edward P. Jones are freely available online. Contributors may find these useful:
- After the MFA (Part 1):
http://www.afterthemfa.com/archives/from-mfa-to-pulitzer-in-22-years-int... - After the MFA (Part 2):
http://www.afterthemfa.com/archives/a-star-in-the-sky-to-guide-you-inter... - Aspen Ideas Festival:
http://fora.tv/2007/07/07/A_Public_Radio_International_Program#fullprogr... - BookBrowse:
http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number... - Ed Champion (Bat Segundo):
http://www.edrants.com/bss-80-edward-p-jones/ - Identity Theory:
http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum138.php - Michael Silverblatt (1):
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw061130edward_p_jones - Michael Silverblatt (2):
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw031211edward_p_jones - Michael Silverblatt (3):
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw050623african_americans_an - National Public Radio:
http://npr.vo.llnwd.net/kip0/_pxn=0+_pxK=17273/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2003/... - Politics and Prose:
http://www.politics-prose.com/10-questions/10-questions-edward-p-jones-0 - Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11797-2003Oct24.html
Also valuable is Wyatt Mason's Harper's article on the Jones oeuvre, the first piece of serious criticism to attempt to bring Jones' work to the attention of a wider audience: http://harpers.org/media/pages/2006/09/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2006-09-00812... (PDF file).