Published here for the first time is Bruce Nugent's short novel, Half High, a story about a mysterious young artist named Aeon, whose mixed racial heritage alienates him from both the Black and white worlds of 1920s New York and beyond. A stand-alone novella that nonetheless further engages with the characters in Nugent's full-length novel Gentleman Jigger, this important work deepens our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, Black modernism, and Black modernism's relationship to the modernist work white authors were producing at the time as well. Presented here with a short introduction by Whit Frazier, including a brief discussion of how this work came to be published.

Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.

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