Black Reading: Lyrics of the Color Line

Sonya Posmentier is associate professor of English at New York University. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book argues that extreme environmental experiences such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes as well as the slower social disaster of enforced agricultural enslavement have shaped black modern literature and culture, and in particular poetic forms. She is at work on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books, and elsewhere, and she has published poems in Grey, The Seneca Review, and Perihelion. Posmentier teaches classes on Black diasporic literature and culture and is part of the NYU Sanctuary Campus Coalition.https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/barber/1001/thumbnail.jp