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Shanna Greene Benjamin
Media
My work lives at the intersection of personal history and literary scholarship. In a very conscious way, who I am informs the stories I tell about Black literature and how I tell them. Early in the research for Half in Shadow,
while I was working at an elite liberal arts college in Iowa, I asked myself: “How did there come to be a
place for me, a Black woman teaching African American literature, in the American academy?”
I quickly learned that in narrating McKay’s life, I was also telling a bigger story about
Black women in the professoriate. In my interviews, appearances,
and published work, I inspire others
to find power in the lesson Half in Shadow taught me:
tell the story that only you can.
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