9 January 1973

Dear Professor Mphahlele

I have recently been reading your new collection of essays entitled Voices in the Whirlwind and found them to be more than exciting for me. I was also pleased to discover that your approach to literary analysis appears to be quite close to my own method of analysis. I have also had a good response from those of my students who are using your book for their own end of term critical essays about Afro-American literature.

I am a published Afro-American poet whose work has appeared in a number of small magazines including Freedomways, American Dialog, (where I am also a contributing editor), Roots, The Fiddlehead (University of New Brunswick, Can), Black Collegian, and other quarterlies. My work has also appeared in several anthologies including Night Comes Softly edited by the poet Nikkie Giovanni; People in Poetry and Poetry by Blacks, Volumes 1 and 2. My poem ‘Glow Child’ is both the title and lead poem of a new anthology edited by Sister Ruby Dee called Glow Child. I have taught Afro-American drama at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University during the fall semester of 1971-72, and am currently teaching under a year appointment of Vassar College. I have recently completed my Masters at Columbia University and am now working toward my doctorate in Comparative Literature at New York University where I project that I will work in the area of Afro-Asian literatures through the medium of the Arabic language which I am presently studying. In my spare time I am still writing and working on several dramas.

During the past five years since my return to college I have never lost sight of the fact that I am first and foremost a poet whose thought is concerned with the common humanity of all the world's people. So that during my years of school I have also been very active in oral poetry readings and lecture discussion sessions throughout the New York area. During my academic study I always considered it my duty as a poet to combine routine scholarship with both creativity and penetrating beyond the normal requirements for students.