Books by Dr. Sondra Kathryn Wilson

Modern Library Harlem RenaissanceIn 1923, the Urban League''s Opportunity magazine made its first appearance. Spearheaded by the noted sociologist Charles S. Johnson, it became, along with the N.A.A.C.P.''s Crisis magazine, one of the vehicles that drove the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. As a way of attracting writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Johnson conducted literary contests that were largely funded by Casper Holstein, the infamous Harlem numbers gangster, who contributed several essays in addition to money.        Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, and Arthur Schomburg were among Opportunity''s contributors. Many of the pieces included in The Opportunity Reader have not been seen since their publication in the magazine, whose motto was "Not alms, but opportunity."The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today''s renaissance of black writers.

After its start in 1910, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920, Langston Hughes''s poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in The Crisis and W. E. B. Du Bois, the magazine''s editor, wrote about the coming "renaissance of American Negro literature," beginning what is now known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Crisis Reader is a collection of poems, short stories, plays, and essays from this great literary period and includes, in addition to four previously unpublished poems by James Weldon Johnson, work by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke.