CFP: Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues at 100
Special Issue of The Langston Hughes Review

Guest Editor: Michael Borshuk (Texas Tech University)

2026 will mark a century since Langston Hughes’s landmark debut volume, The Weary Blues, was published. The book announced Hughes as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a powerful voice in modern American poetry. It also marked the beginning of a long publishing relationship with Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Although he coolly dismissed much of Hughes’s collection in his review in Opportunity, Countee Cullen opined that “dull books cause no schisms, raise no dissentions, create no parties. Much will be said of The Weary Blues because it is a definite achievement.” Indeed, much has been said of Hughes’s work in the intervening one hundred years, regarding both its innovative form and adventurous content.

For this special issue, The Langston Hughes Review welcomes proposals that demonstrate the immediate influence and long legacies of The Weary Blues. Essays that address the collection’s influence on other artists, whether contemporaries or inheritors of Hughes, are encouraged.

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• The Weary Blues and its relationship to modernism’s vast aesthetic experimentation.
• Hughes’s poetry as the inauguration of a jazz poetics, and its influence on the relationship between Black writing and music in other contexts, including (but not limited to) soul, rhythm and blues, funk, and hip hop.
• The political possibility Hughes located in Black vernacular expression, including influences on his work and its legacy in later Black writing.
• The geographies of The Weary Blues (including Harlem, the American South, and the volume’s global locations).
• Hughes's theorization of Blackness and Black subjectivity through culture, place, and history.
• The matrix of small magazines supporting Hughes and other Black writers.
• The representation of Hughes’s poems in other contexts, such as museums and libraries.
• Adaptations of The Weary Blues by musical and visual artists, including Hughes’s own collaborations with other artists.
• Remaking or reclaiming Hughes’s reputation and legacy by successive generations of artists.
• Hughes’s relationships with his contemporaries.
• Publication and editorial histories.
• Digital Humanities projects and The Weary Blues.
• Hughes’s attention to and flaunting of tradition, both expressive and political.

Interested contributors should send a 500-word abstract and a 2-page CV to Michael Borshuk (michael.borshuk@ttu.edu) by July 15, 2025. Those invited to participate in the issue will be asked to submit complete essays for editing and peer review by December 1, 2025, with final revisions due by October 2026.

Please direct all inquiries to Michael Borshuk at michael.borshuk@ttu.edu.