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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Tapping into an exciting abundance of younger African-American writers, UGA poet and  assistant professor of English and African-American Studies Kevin Young has edited a new anthology called Giant Steps, which has just been released by publisher HarperCollins.
The book showcases the poetry and prose of 26 writers who are 40 or younger, including such noted authors as Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead and Randall Kenan.
“It’s a nice feeling to be able to bring such fine writers together in one volume,” says Young. “I hope I can help introduce these writers to each other and expand their readership nationally.”
Giant Steps is the latest work for Young, who is quickly becoming one of the best-known younger writers in America. His poetry has been published in virtually every major journal and magazine in the country, from The New Yorker to The Paris Review, and his first book of poetry, Most Way Home, won the national Poetry Series and the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares magazine.
Most Way Home sold out after a major feature on Young was broadcast on National Public Radio in 1999, but the volume is being reprinted later this year. His next book of poetry, To Repel Ghosts, will be published by Zoland Books in 2001.
As Young makes clear in the introduction to Giant Steps, the contributors to the anthology can’t really be considered “emerging writers,” since they have achieved honors as diverse as being a National Book Award finalist or having a book selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Indeed, many of the contributors have won Pushcart Prizes and had their work featured in the annual collections of best American poetry and short stories.
“But even the best anthologies skimp on younger writers,” says Young. “By neglecting the generation of this anthology, we neglect the transformative possibilities of youth.”
Young’s anthology is named after the 1960 album of the same name by jazz saxophone great John Coltrane. Young says the volume hangs together because the writers, as a generation, address “several shifting yet recurring themes in their writing: next to history, music; a willingness to use popular culture and/or experimental narratives; a focus on ancestry, especially slavery; a fluid yet frank manner in discussing sexuality, race or biracialness; a freedom of form and techniques, even ranging across genres; the travelogue; and a combination of popular culture, folkways and wisdom beyond their years.”
Perhaps best-known of the writers in the anthology is Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American who writes of “oppression and possibility” in such works as Breath, Eyes, Memory. She gained millions of readers when her work was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, arguably the most powerful force in American publishing today.
Other writers, however, such as Colson Whitehead, are becoming increasingly well known. His first novel, The Intuitionist, published in 1999, was hailed by Time magazine as “the freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” It was selected this year as a PEN/Hemingway award finalist.
Many anthologies of younger writers focus on one genre or another, usually poetry or prose, but Young thought it was important to cross genres.
“While the black experience does come out, it’s about as varied and pluralistic as you can imagine,” says Young. “There are recurring concerns with history and music and with slavery, often in unconventional ways. In one way or another, all these writers come from the jazz or hip-
hop aesthetic of improvisation and inspiration.”
The idea for the anthology came to Young not long after the publication of his volume of poetry, Most Way Home. He had been reading the work of his peers and getting to meet them, and he realized there was a need for a collection of their work in a single book. From the beginning, he wanted the title Giant Steps for the anthology, since it expresses, on several levels, what the writers have been accomplishing for the last few years.
Young quickly denies that he, in any way, “discovered” these writers, all of whom have published at least one book.
“We are, among other things, the hip-hop generation, having grown up alongside that art form,” writes Young in the book’s introduction. “What this means is not simply that the writers here are rappers or even urban. Rather, they use, quite comfortably, hip-hop’s aesthetic and sense of history--that history is ever-present, the past easily taken from (‘sampled’), repeated (‘looped’), collaged together, unified often only by voice and by the rhythm of day-to-day life (‘flow’ and ‘beat’).”
Young points out that what folk culture was to the first great black movement in American letters, the Harlem Renaissance, popular culture is to the “post-soul” writer. Rather than confirm preconceived notions of black writing, Young hopes Giant Steps will “counter our expectations of what black writing should be” with what it actually is today.
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