KU News Release

KU English professor to speak at New Deal Gathering in Washington, D.C.

John Edgar Tidwell

LAWRENCE — John Edgar Tidwell, associate professor of English at the University of Kansas, will speak at the New Deal Gathering, to be held March 13 and 14 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the American Folklife Center, the public symposium is titled “Art, Culture and Government: The New Deal at 75.” The symposium aims to refocus attention on the New Deal, the multifaceted social, cultural and fiscal recovery programs launched in 1933 to reform and reinvigorate national life in the wake of the Great Depression.

Tidwell will speak Friday, March 14, on “Negro Fictions, Fictitious Negroes and Sterling A. Brown’s Quest for Authenticity on the Federal Writers’ Project” during a panel discussion titled “The New Deal Legacy and Contemporary Scholarship.” Brown was a poet, writer, scholar, professor at Howard University and editor of Negro affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project.

Last year, Tidwell published “A Negro Looks at the South by Sterling A. Brown,” written with Mark Sanders of Emory University. Tidwell has recently completed a second book on Brown with Steven Tracy of University of Massachusetts-Amherst titled “After Winter: Selected Writings on the Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown.”

Tidwell has written extensively about other writers who were Brown’s contemporaries: Frank Marshall Davis, an Arkansas City native whose career as a journalist and poet took him to Atlanta, Chicago and Honolulu; Langston Hughes, the acclaimed poet and writer whose maternal family lived in Lawrence; and the late Gordon Parks, the Fort Scott native who distinguished himself as a photographer and writer. Tidwell’s other books include “Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes” and “Writings of Frank Marshall Davis, A Voice of the Black Press,” both published in 2007; “Black Moods: Collected Poems,” published in 2002; and “Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet,” published in 1992.

Tidwell’s many awards for research, scholarship and teaching include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Before joining KU’s Department of English in 1999, Tidwell taught at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; St. Olaf College in Minnesota; and the University of Kentucky-Lexington. In 1994, he was the Langston Hughes visiting professor at KU. He earned a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, a master’s from Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., and a bachelor’s from Washburn University in Topeka.

He is the son of Verlean Tidwell of Independence, Kan.

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