ABOUT

2x American Book Award recipient
Past President, National Council of
Teachers of English (NCTE)
Past Chair, Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of
English and African American
Studies at Penn State
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Keith Gilyard has passionately embraced African-American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator.
Since the 1970s, Keith Gilyard has made significant contributions to English studies as a writer, teacher, and participant in professional associations. His more than 250 publications include On African-American Rhetoric (2018, with Adam Banks), the The Promise of Language: A Memoir (2025), and Discourse in Black (2025). He received an American Book Award for his biography John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (2010). His dozens of creative works include the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2016) and the poetry volumes Impressions: New and Selected Poems (2021) and On Location (2025).
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A native New Yorker, Gilyard is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. He previously taught at the City University of New York--Medgar Evers College, where he helped to establish the National Black Writers Conference, and at Syracuse University, where he directed the Writing Program. Active in the Conference on College Composition and Communication as well as the National Council of Teachers of English since 1983, Gilyard served as Chair of CCCC in 2000 and as President of NCTE in 2012.