Carla Kaplan has held positions at Yale University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Illinois and also teaches writing through arts councils and writers’ centers. As Founding Director of Northeastern University’s Humanities Center, Carla Kaplan created a conversational hub dedicated to diversity.
Kaplan’s previous books include Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman’s letters. She has edited numerous works of African American literature, including Hurston’s, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States; Nella Larsen’s novels, Passing and Quicksand, Dark Symphony, by Elizabeth Laura Adams.
Miss Anne in Harlem draws on Kaplan’s thirty years as a white scholar in Black Studies to explore cultural crossovers. Her next book, a biography of Jessica Mitford, the rebellious daughter of eccentric British peers—a woman with a wicked sense of humor who gave up wealth and privilege to become an American activist and, eventually, one of the most important American muckrakers of the twentieth century—will also be published by HarperCollins.
Kaplan has received many academic honors, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Beinecke Library.
Sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies and American Studies
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