Author Talk: Dr. April C. E. Langley on Black Women Poets

The Author Series Committee at DPL welcomes Dr. April C. E. Langley, author of Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching: Early Black Christian Women's Lives Matter (Wayne State University Press, 2025). Weaving together the legacies of early Black Christian women, the book explores the foundational ways in which faith, poetics, and spirituality have shaped Black activism in the United States.

Langley employs Afrofuturist and Sankofic lenses to provide a dynamic close reading of the speeches, letters, poems, and sermons of three foremothers of modern Black women's social justice movements—Phillis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, and Jarena Lee—and highlights the resistance strategies emerging from their use of religion as a means for imagination and potential liberation.

This book shows how Black women's spiritual writing has also inspired and informed intersectional social justice movements of today's era—#SayHerName, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter—as well as impacting the profound works of scholars, politicians, community leaders, and artists such as Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Tarana Burke, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé. This timely examination of early Black Christian women and their writing reminds us of the importance of retrieving what is lost to understand where we are and where we are going.

About April: April C. E. Langley is a retired associate professor and chair of African American studies at the University of South Carolina and associate professor emerita of English and Black studies at the University of Missouri–Columbia. She is also the author of The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature.

Copies of April's books will be available for purchase from ! This is NOT a ticketed event, which means tickets will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Questions? Email [email protected]!

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