Some exciting Chesnutt news are on the horizon!  For the first time in more than a half century, there will be a new comprehensive biography on Chesnutt. Tess Chakkalakal, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College and frequent contributor to the Charles W. Chesnutt Association’s panels at various conferences, has recently completed a definitive biography of Chesnutt. A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt will be released by St. Martin’s Press in February 2025. Look out for an announcement early next year about a discussion of the biography with the author at the ALA in Boston in May of 2025.

From St. Martin’s Press:

“In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered ‘mixed race.’ He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing.  He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.
Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal tells the story of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry.”