Reading Groups

Black Women Writers' Literary Geography with Dr. Maia Butler

3 Sessions Wednesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT January 22 to March 12, 2025

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
1/22, 2/19, 3/12
Online via Zoom

In this reading group, we will engage with three novels by Black women writers who have crafted rich depictions of the U.S. South. We’ll journey to the Carolinas and Louisiana through these texts with narratives that will take us into the past, the past within the present, and even into the future. We’ll discuss these fictional representations of contested landscapes and the characters’ explorations of their layers of cultural histories. We’ll think about the complex web of relations between the characters and their ecological surroundings, and of the meaning of homeplace for those most marginalized by our society.

What to read before the first meeting: Please read the first half of Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward.

What to expect from this reading group: Each of these texts is a juicy read in its own way, so I’ll be bringing questions to the reading circle to get us going, and participants should feel welcome to do the same. I look forward to sharing important concepts in literary geographies that will shift the way you encounter place in your reading. I hope that participants will enjoy discussion questions that lead to organic exchange, as our meaning-making becomes richer when all participants bring what they know into the circle.

Reading List:

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
Orleans by Sherri L. Smith

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington. She is a literary geographer centering Black women writers within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She co-founded the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-edited the award-winning collection Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and is at work on her first monograph Floating Homelands: Postnational Constructions of Home by Black Women and Nonbinary Writers, which has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies, hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard trustee.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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