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The editors are seeking contributors to write biographical entries for the African American National Biography, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. The largest African American Studies project ever undertaken, covering a broader range of African American lives than ever before, the African American National Biography will present history through a mosaic of the lives of 10,000 individuals, some known throughout the world and others all but forgotten, illuminating the abiding influence of African Americans on the life of this nation through the immediacy of individual experience. Our goal is to include not only great and famous African Americans, but a selection of lives that will be representative of the scope of African American experience.
We are commissioning articles on African Americans in all fields, from all periods of North American history, and from all stations of life — activists, writers and journalists, slaves, sharecroppers, domestic workers, laborers, musicians, politicians, government workers, judges, lawyers, ministers, preachers, and other religious workers, educators, athletes, sports figures, actors, directors, filmmakers, doctors, nurses, artists, photographers, business people, entrepreneurs, military personnel, scientists, philanthropists, dancers, frontiersmen, cowboys, inventors, aviators, astronauts, explorers, legendary figures, and more.
AANB entries are typically 1,000 to 1,500 words in length. Each article will be signed by the author and will include a brief bibliography. Authors will receive an honorarium, typically $100-$150, based on the contracted length of each entry.
Lists of unassigned names and an application to write can be accessed on the AANB Web site, at the web address shown below. We also welcome suggestions for subjects whose names do not presently appear on our lists.
The first publication of the project, African American Lives (Oxford University Press, 2004), a collection of 600 biographies of notable African Americans, was published in April and, in the words of the Publishers Weekly reviewer, “will undoubtedly become a standard in the field.” Author and critic Julius Lester has called it “a definitive book.”
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