Reading List: "It's All in the Reveal...": Valerie Maynard, Revelation, and Black (Dis) Belonging by Alexis De Veaux
Photo of Valerie Maynard. Photo Source: Baltimore Magazine.
By Alexis De Veaux
A reading list by Alexis De Veaux from her teach-in on “It’s All in the Reveal: Valerie Maynard, Revelation, and Black (Dis) Belonging” for The School for Black Feminist Politics.
On Tuesday, November 12th at 6:30 PM EST, we hosted the teach-in, “It’s All in the Reveal: Valerie Maynard, Revelation, and Black (Dis) Belonging” by Alexis De Veaux for The School for Black Feminist Politics, the political education hub of Black Women Radicals.
About the teach-in: In this teach-in, Alexis De Veaux spoke about the life and work of the late Black visual artist Valerie Maynard, as she was undersign as a cultural revolutionary; and how her identities as black and female and her "unvoiced" identity as queer shaped being "at home" in a culture within which black people are always "homeless" by virtue of being both black and not human and therefore members of a "(dis) belonged" class.
About Alexis De Veaux: ALEXIS DE VEAUX, PhD, is a black queer feminist independent scholar whose work in multiple genres is internationally known. Born and raised in Harlem, New York City, she is published in five languages-English, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Over the past five decades her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, most recently in Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (ed. Briona Simone Jones, 2021). The author of children's books and works for the stage, De Veaux is the author of the memoir Spirits In The Street (1973); the biography-in-prose, Don’t Explain, A Song of Billie Holiday (1980); Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985, reprinted 2023, Sinister Wisdom).
De Veaux also authored Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004). The first biography of the pioneering lesbian poet, Warrior Poet won several prestigious awards including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005), the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Award (2004), and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Biography (2004). Her novel, Yabo, was published by Redbone Press (2014) and was awarded the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Her latest work, JesusDevil, The Parables was published by AK Press in the spring of 2023.
Reading List
Collage of Valerie Maynard by Jaimee Swift.
Getty, Karen Berisford. “Searching for the Transatlantic Freedom; The Art of Valerie Maynard,” scholarscompass.vcu.edu, Virginia Commonwealth University, December 1, 2017.
Robinson, Jontyle Theresa and Maya Angelou. Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists. New York: Superman College and Rizzoli International Publications, 1996.
De Veaux, Alexis, “The LostFound: Catastrophe and Memory in Works on Paper” by Valerie Maynard, Lost & Found, eds. Asthma Name and Leslie Cozzi, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, 2020.
_________“Val’s Theory of black life in white mouth,” “Bookstate” by Alexis De Veaux, 2014.
Baker, Opal K.C., “Speaking in Tongues: The Folk Voices of Painter Valerie Maynard.” The New Crisis (March/April 1999), pp.30-33.
Farrington, Lisa E., Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Thompson, Mildred, “Interview: Valerie Maynard”,: Art Papers 14, no. 4 (July/ August 1990), pp. 6-7.
“Human-Beingness According to Valerie Maynard,” Bmore Art, December 13, 2017.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.