Publications (selected)
Monographs
Discourse in Black
Explore the influential prose of Keith Gilyard in this impressive collection, bringing together three seminal works that challenge and expand our understanding of language, education, and cultural identity.
True to the Language Game
In True to the Language Game, Keith Gilyard, one of the major African American figures to emerge in language and cultural studies, makes his most seminal work available in one volume.
On African-American Rhetoric
On African-American Rhetoric traces the arc of strategic language use by African Americans from rhetorical forms such as slave narratives and the spirituals to Black digital expression and contemporary activism.
John Oliver Killens: A Life
of Black Literary Activism
Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy
In Composition and Cornel West, Gilyard identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.
Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father who inspired a generation of African American novelists with his politically charged works. Seeking to strengthen our understanding of this important literary figure, Keith Gilyard departs from standard critical frameworks to reveal Killens’s novels as artful renderings of rich African American rhetorical forms and verbal traditions.
Louise Thompson Patterson:
A Life of Struggle for Justice
Born in 1901, Louise Thompson Patterson was a leading and transformative figure in radical African American politics. Throughout most of the twentieth century she embodied a dedicated resistance to racial, economic, and gender exploitation.
Conversations in Cultural Rhetoric and Composition Studies
Conversations in Cultural Rhetoric and Composition Studies is a collection of in-depth interviews featuring leading figures from across the composition and rhetoric field. With topics ranging from issues of cultural, racial, and ethnic identity to the history of composition and rhetoric in higher education, these conversations define cutting-edge concepts in a postmodern intellectual context.
Fusing insights derived from practical experience with knowledge drawn from an impressive and interdisciplinary array of texts, Gilyard examines-always with an eye on the state of African America-connections among language, politics, expressive culture, and pedagogy. This book is a rousing contribution to the African American intellectual tradition.
A unique blend of memoir and scholarship, Keith Gilyard's Voices of the Self is a penetrating analysis of the linguistic and cultural "collision" experienced by African-American students in the public education system.
Creative Works
Keith Gilyard's sprawling memoir The Promise of Language makes a passionate case for the power of language, particularly Black language, to transform lives and enliven art and culture.
-Foreword Magazine
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On Location is a Kinetic and brilliant encounter with poetic spaces suffused by Black music, sports, and the political and cultural witness of our day.
- Joanne V. Gabbin, PhD
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Keith Gilyard is that rarity: he is that wordsmith who alludes to far more than he will ever state. He is a master player in the word game and is steeped in iconic voices of African American poetic texts as well as in the considerable encyclopedia depicting the African American experience. I approach his work with the same reverence that I bring to a Thelonious Monk. I come with newly fitted hearing aids and a note pad. I read Impressions: New and Selected Poems and ponder the labyrinth of volumes suggested in each of his nuances. And when I discover them, I am amazed and I shout.
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- Sterling D. Plumpp
Black novels nowadays are divided between ‘hood novels and the post-race novels of the black millennial class. Rarely does a writer traverse as many cultural zones as Keith Gilyard in The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy. He has a good ear, an eye for detail, and his writing is lean and sharp. -----Ishmael Reed
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This is a work of wonder, a crisp percussive narrative carrying a heavy load with style and grace---novella lean and smokehouse mean.
-Arthur Flowers
Edited Works
Released in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birth, this collection is vibrant testimony to the enormity of his legacy in the world of art. This provocative volume explores the relationship between Malcolm’s ideas and a variety of 20th- and 21st-century creative output, including poetry, plays, hip-hop, painting, opera, film, novels, and children’s biography. This survey is fitting given the emphasis that Malcolm X placed on the role of artists and his call for a cultural revolution. Works discussed include Jeff Stetson’s The Meeting, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Regina King and Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami, and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.
In the wake of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown, and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out presents a bold and timely response to one of the most urgent moral issues of our time. This powerful anthology centers the lives of Palestinian children and offers an uncompromising critique of state violence, settler colonialism, and the global community's complicity.
How might ethnic rhetorics function as generative sites of difference? How might ethnic rhetorics shape composition instruction? How do they relate to the rhetorical tradition, classical and contemporary? How can we both celebrate and critique regional, racial, and gender alternatives that exist along the broad linguistic spectrum within our daily lives as teachers of English? How can ethnic rhetorics influence the purposes and modes that comprise the American rhetorical tradition? Drawn from a 2001 conference entitled "American Ethnic Rhetorics," the essays in this volume open up vigorous debate about alternative discourses and modes of presentation. Drawing upon a methodology Gilyard calls "critical ethnicity," the authors analyze notions of history, identity, and pedagogy in essays that range from scholarly article and aesthetic analysis to autobiographical memoir and personal confession.
An outline to the African American poetic conversation of the 1990s, Spirit and Flame is the first intergenerational volume of African American poetry with an expressly contemporary focus since the numerous and influential black poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of numerous forms (jazz stylings to haiku) and topics (middle passage to 0. J.), this present gathering of fifty-three significant poets, among them Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, and Patricia Smith, illustrates both the vibrancy of the African American experience and the talented and current poetic response that is part and parcel of it.