Hannah Crafts Discovered! is an anthology following up on Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins’s 2004 anthology  In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on  The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Basic/Civitas 2004) in light of Gregg Hecimovich’s prize-winning and game-changing Life and Times of Hannah Crafts (Harper Collins 2023) that definitely identifies the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative as a Black enslaved woman, as Gates had first proposed in 2002.  

Hannah Crafts Discovered! will include scholars from the 2004 anthology revisiting their essays in light of Hecimovich’s discoveries, before any details of Hannah Crafts’s biography were known. We also invite scholars who have written on Crafts and new scholars who haven’t yet written on The Bondwoman’s Narrative to consider this extraordinary work of literary imagination that stands on its own, that for over two decades expanded the canon of African American literature without being definitively grounded in the facts and horrors of slavery. As Brenda Wineapple recently wrote in the New York Review, there is a lot left to say. 

Please send queries as well as abstracts for a 5000-8000 word essay to Hollis.Robbins@utah.edu before November 1, 2024.

Important Dates                                                                                                                                                                                                  

• Abstract Deadline : November 1, 2024
• Notification : December 25, 2024
• Final Manuscript Due : April 15 ,2024
• Publication Date : TBD