Anthony Reed (Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Yale) has been awarded the prestigious 2015 William Sanders Scarborough Prize given by the Modern Language Association for his book Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, (Johns Hopkins UP 2014) The Scarborough prize honors a book representing ”an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture.”
The MLA committee’s citation for Freedom Time reads:
“Intellectually sharp, deeply insightful, and eloquently rendered, Anthony Reed’s Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing challenges us to radically unlearn what we know about the power, ambitions, and goals of black experimental writing from the 1960s to the present day. Rethinking black experimental writing as myopically reactionary and political, Reed shows the extent to which the work is visionary and expansive beyond the limits of challenging established Eurocentric poetic forms and aesthetic values. Indeed, he demonstrates how that kind of writing has radically transformed such forms and values and, by extension, revolutionized our very notions of race, freedom, liberty, beauty, love, and democratic possibilities.”
View Anthony Reed’s profile page in the Department of African American Studies: http://afamstudies.yale.edu/people/anthony-reed