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Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966) was the most prolific female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1877 in Atlanta, Georgia, Johnson devoted much of her artistic imagination to indexing African American women’s interior life and advancing the means through which to achieve interracial cooperation. After a Thousand Tears represents the only extant poetry collection that Johnson authored between 1928 and 1962, and it illustrates her more nuanced and transgressive prescription for gender, racial, and national advancement.

Although scholars have critically examined Johnson’s four previously published collections of poetry (The Heart of a Woman [1918], Bronze [1922], An Autumn Love Cycle [1928], and Share My World [1962]), they have never engaged After a Thousand Tears. Jimmy Worthy II located the unpublished work while conducting archival research at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Worthy discovered that while Johnson intended to publish Tears with Padma Publications of Bombay in 1947, the project never came to fruition. Published now, for the first time, this volume features eighty-one poems that offer Johnson’s intimate and forthright sensibility toward African American women’s lived experiences during and following the Harlem Renaissance.

University of Georgia Press

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University Publications Ser.

After a Thousand Tears: Poems

Dear Regina offers a remarkable window into the early years of one of America’s best-known literary figures. While at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop from 1945 to 1948, Flannery O’Connor wrote to her mother Regina Cline O’Connor (who she addressed by her first name) nearly every day and sometimes more than once a day. The complete correspondence of more than six hundred letters is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. From that number, Miller selects 486 letters to show us a young adult learning to adjust to life on her own for the first time. In these letters, O’Connor shares details about living in a boardinghouse and subsisting on canned food and hot-plate dinners, and she asks for advice about a wide range of topics, including how to assuage her relatives’ concerns about her well-being and how to buy whiskey to use for cough medicine.

These letters, which are being published for the first time with the unprecedented permission of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, also off er readers important insights into O’Connor’s intellectually formative years, when her ideas about writing, race, class, and interpersonal relationships were developing and changing. Her preoccupation with money, employment, and other practical matters reveals a side of O’Connor that we do not often see in her previously published letters. Most importantly, the letters show us her relationship with her mother in a much more intimate, positive light than we have seen before. The importance of this aspect of the letters cannot be overstated, given that so much literary analysis conflates her and Regina with the “sour, deformed daughters and self-righteous mothers” that critic Louise Westling sees so often in O’Connor’s work.

Dear Regina: Flannery O'Connor's Letters from Iowa