The African American Literature and Culture Society has launched its inaugural newsletter! Check it out at the link below. Like the Chesnutt Association, the AALCS will be hosting several sessions at the ALA in 2026 (described in the newsletter), and we are delighted to co-sponsor the AALCS Awards Reception at next year’s conference. AALCS Newsletter,… Read more: Inaugural AALCS Newsletter

Charles W. Chesnutt Association American Literature Association37th Annual ConferenceMay 20-23, 2026Palmer House17 East Monroe StreetChicago, IL 60603 The Charles W. Chesnutt Association welcomes abstracts of no more than 300 words for presentation at two sessions on the work of Chesnutt at the 2026 ALA conference in Chicago. Subjects for submissions are open but may include one… Read more: ALA 2026 CALL FOR PAPERS

The Chesnutt Association hosted two exciting panels at the 2025 American Literature Association conference in Boston, May 21-25 2025. In addition to these engaging and well-attended panels, there were two other papers delivered at the conference on the work of Chesnutt. A Matter of Complexion: A Roundtable Discussion of Tess Chakkalakal’s new biography of Charles… Read more: Chesnutt at 2025 ALA

Just out (February 4th, 2025) and available for your reading pleasure: A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt by Tess Chakkalakal Macmillan (Imprint: St. Martin’s Press) Tess Chakkalakal is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin. She is also co-editor, with Ken Warren, of Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs and Jim Crow,… Read more: A New Chesnutt Biography

Chesnutt scholarship was well represented at this year’s MLA, January 9-12, 2025 in New Orleans at various sessions and a roundtable! (Also, a reminder that anyone with a proposal for the ALA has until TOMORROW, January 20, 2025 to submit it! Click here for more!) I. Paper Presentations: II. Roundtable

The UCLA Departments of English and African American Studies are conducting a senior search in early African American literature and have asked the Association to spread the word, since Chesnutt scholars might be interested. Have a look!

Charles W. Chesnutt Association American Literature Association36th Annual ConferenceMay 21-24, 2025The Westin Copley Place10 Huntington AvenueBoston, MA 02116 The Charles W. Chesnutt Association welcomes abstracts of no more than 300 words for presentation at two sessions on the work of Chesnutt at the 2025 ALA conference in Boston. Subjects for submissions are open but may include… Read more: ALA 2025 CALL FOR PAPERS

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… Read more: A New Chesnutt Biography

The Chesnutt Association is proud to have sponsored panels at the annual meetings of the College Language Association in Memphis, TN (April 10-13, 2024) and of the American Literature Association in Chicago, IL (May 23-26, 2024). CLA Panel:Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Problem of Justice Chair: Elizabeth J. West, Georgia State University ALA Panel:Overlooked Angles… Read more: Chesnutt at the CLA and ALA!

Those of you at the ALA conference in Boston last summer will remember hearing the paper on Chesnutt and stenography presented by Susanna Ashton.  We are happy to share the news that Susanna recently published an article that emerged from this research.  See “Charles Chesnutt and the Racial History of the Stenographic Imagination” in the… Read more: “Charles Chesnutt and the Racial History of the Stenographic Imagination” — and a Reminder

Call for Papers The Charles W. Chesnutt Association welcomes abstracts of no more than 300 words for presentation at two sessions on the work of Chesnutt at the 2024 ALA: American Literature Association 35th Annual ConferenceMay 23-26, 2024The Palmer House Hilton * 17 East Monroe Street * Chicago, IL 60603 Subjects for submissions are open… Read more: Chesnutt at the 2024 ALA

On Tess Chakkalakal, “Charles Chesnutt’s European Diary” AngloAmericana, special issue of Letterature d’America, vol. 28, Issue 169, 2018, pp. 5-32.By Morgan Shaffer, PhD Student, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Following the tradition of many other American “gentleman writers” who toured Europe as part of their authorial education, Charles W. Chesnutt embarked on a whirlwind tour of… Read more: A New Adventure: Chesnutt’s 1896 European Diary 

Session 16-C Chesnutt’s Craft: Writing and Revising Stories and Myths Saturday, May 27, 2023, 10:00-11:20 amOrganized by the Charles W. Chesnutt AssociationChair: Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee This paper focuses on the extended tournament scene in chapter five of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) to explore the ways in which Chesnutt mocks… Read more: Chesnutt Panels at the 2023 ALA in Boston

CALL FOR PAPERS Charles W. Chesnutt Association American Literature Association 34th Annual Conference May 25-28, 2023 The Westin Copley Place10 Huntington AvenueBoston, MA 02116 The Charles W. Chesnutt Association welcomes abstracts of no more than 300 words for presentation at two sessions on the work of Chesnutt at the 2023 ALA conference in Boston. Subjects for… Read more: Chesnutt Association CfP for ALA 2023 in Boston

With much thanks to Evelyn Williams from the United States Post Office, the Chesnutt Association now has some memorabilia from the dedication of the Charles W. Chesnutt stamp, which was issued in 2008 as part of the Black Heritage Stamp Series. The dedication ceremony was held at the Cleveland, Ohio Public Library on Jan. 31,… Read more: Chesnutt Celebration Memorabilia

The Chesnutt Association sponsored a panel at ALA, May 26-29, 2022, on New Directions in Chesnutt Scholarship The Chesnutt Association sponsored a panel at the 2022 American Literature Association (May 26-29, 2022, Chicago). It was a pleasure to see a full room and to give a round of applause of appreciation to Dr. Ernestine Pickens… Read more: Chesnutt Panel at ALA 2022

The Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association awarded Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig the 2018 Sylvia Lyons Render Award “in recognition of outstanding scholarship on the life and works of Charles Waddell Chesnutt.”  Ashton and Hardwig received the award for their work editing “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt” (MLA Press, 2017).

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry devoted seven years to a stage adaption of Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition about the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina coup and race massacre. The earliest draft is dated 1955. She imagined a cast, a set, and wrote stage directions. She revised and revised, for years. She marked up her copy of… Read more: Hansberry Adapting Chesnutt