Workshopping Black Radicalism

Within midcentury Black literature were two influential and overlapping, yet ideologically different, cultural forces: the writers’ groups of the US Communist left and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW), the founding and flagship program of the academic discipline of creative writing. During this time, the Communist Party of the United States backed a range of writing groups, workshops, journals, and other literary organizations that supported Black writers and critics, while by the 1950’s the IWW had become a major production site of American literary and intellectual work.

In this compelling cultural history, Nathaniel Mills charts the histories of Black writers in the IWW, including Margaret Walker and Rita Dove, and those who participated in Communist writing clubs and other leftist political organizations, such as Richard Wright. MIlls argues that Black writers reimagined and repurposed these white-dominated spaces, to usher in a Black literary culture with an interracial and international revolutionary ethos at heart. In doing so, these writers changed not only the literary landscape in the United States and beyond but changed the institutions where they honed their craft.