I Write Only That Whereof I Know (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, editor Evie Shockley returns to discuss her first encounter with this text in graduate school, the book's place in the literary canon and the classroom, and her favorite passage. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.   For her poetry collections—including suddenly we, semiautomatic, the new black, and a half-red sea—she has been awarded the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize, has twice won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has received an NAACP Image Award, and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize.   She has served as an editor of jubilat and Feminist Studies, and is Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature.To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393870787.Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social.