McKay’s Anthology Nominated for Image Award

Nellie McKay, professor of Afro-American Studies and English, and her 10 co-editors last week received another honor for their recently published anthology of African American literature, a work originally intended as a textbook that has attracted a popular as well as an academic audience.

The Norton Anthology of African America Literature was nominated for a 1997 Image Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Nominees for the awards are chosen by a 500-member selection committee composed of industry professionals and NAACP leaders.

“The nomination for this award, which usually goes to performing artists rather than books, is a very important prize,” says McKay. While the book was not among the award winners announced over the weekend, she says, “the nomination itself is a signal honor for the African American literary tradition, the history of black America, and the history of America in general. Our book has been honored in the academy, the place where books of its kind live and die, but this acknowledgment goes well beyond those selective towers.”

McKay edited the anthology with Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University and nine colleagues from around the country. Its more than 2,000 pages cover 200 -plus years of African American literature. The book includes the first known work by an African American (Lucy Terry’s “Bars Flight,” written in 1746); poetry by Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou; a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and many others.

After earning her M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard, and her B.A. at Queens College in New York, McKay accepted a position with UW–Madison in 1978. Since then, she has authored books on African American women’s autobiographies and writer Jean Toomer. Achieving acclaim as a teacher as well as a researcher, she received a UW System teaching award in 1988 and a UW–Madison Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.