New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America

Kevin Everod Quashie, Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller, eds. New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Upper Saddle: Prentice Hall, 2001. 1128 pp. $51,00.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the significance of the black written and oral traditions has been confirmed by a number of anthologies-African American Literature (1995), Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature (1996), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996), Call and Response: The Oral Tradition (1997), and The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature (2000). Additionally, these anthologies announced the validation of black literary studies in the world of white publishing companies and the academic arenas of colleges and universities.

Narrowing its focus, New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America collects the works of black authors publishing between 1970 and 2000, praising its assortment of "well-known and newer voices" as "quite literally new bones." These...