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Letters from LSU and Skip Gates

on Publishing the Poems Marcus Bruce Christian

October 22, 1985

Louisiana State University Press

Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70893

Mr. Rudolph Lewis

Department of English

University of New Orleans

Lakefront

New Orleans, LA 70148

Dear Mr. Lewis:

Thank you for your letter of October 20. I'm sorry we are not bale to invite submission of "The Selected Poems of Marcus Bruce Christian." We have a very modest series of publishing original poems, generally by living poets. But we have been forced to adopt a policy of not considering selected or collected poems, since our own series is so modest. We do appreciate your thinking of the Press with Mr. Christian's work, and we wish you the best of luck with finding a suitable outlet for it.

Best regards,

(Ms.) Beverly Jarrett

Associate Director & Executive Editor

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[Editor's note: Having been frustrated by the white folks. I went to my brother Skip, with hat in hand pressed tightly against my chest, to see if he could help in our efforts to bring Marcus Bruce Christian from out of the pit that had been dug for him. It was hope against hope, for I knew that Skip was part of the problem because he had left Christian out of his Anthology. He had been involved in publishing however, another Louisiana writer, Alice Dunbar Nelson (which there was little interest other than that she was a black female writer). Below is his response. RL] 

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October 12, 1999

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director

W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities

W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research

Harvard University

Barker Center

12 Quincy Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138-3879

Dear Mr. Lewis:

Thank you much for your recent letter and the copy of Marcus Christian's poems. You are doing a wonderful thing in bringing his writing into print and establishing him in the canon of African American authors. I regret that an extremely full schedule means that I simply have no time for an additional time project, no matter how interesting, and so I cannot take on the writing of an introduction to the publication of another collection of Christian's poems. I regret this, but I know we can all trust your dedication to bring Marcus Christian and his work to the attention they deserve.

Sincerely,

[signed "Skip"]

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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[Editor's note: We also sent Joyce A. Joyce, while she was chair of Temple's Afro-American Studies Department, a copy of I Am New Orleans & Other Poems By Marcus B. Christian to review. I knew she too was part of the canon problem because I had attempted to get her to include Christian in the Anthology she worked on in the late 80s. I brought up the Christian poems then. As I understand it, she was too busy cleaning up after the maid to respond, even though I went out of the way to bring her to Baltimore for a speaking engagement at Enoch Pratt Free Library. Another excuse was that Asante and his posse in the department were threatening to do her bodily damage. RL]

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posted 20 August 2005 / update 29 June 2008