Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics and Public Bibliography

I 1976, Carolyn Fowler, Associate Professor of Black Literature at Atlanta University, began circulating mimeograph copies of an enumerative bibliography consisting of eight hundred entries focusing on a variety of African American arts. Fowler earned her BA and MA in French at UCLA Berkeley and her PhD in Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. She was a specialist in French literature and the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain. Still, her most cited composition was her Black Arts era article, “The Black Writer and His Role” (published when she was known as Carolyn F. Gerald), appearing first inNegro Digest in 1969 and then reprinted in Addison Gayle Jr.’s landmark edited collection, The Black Aesthetic (1971). The rise of the Black Arts Movement and the popularity of her article likely led Fowler to add Black Arts and Black Aesthetics to her research agenda moving forward.