Mixed Race Studies

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

HarperCollins Publishers
2013-09-10
544 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780060882389; ISBN10: 0060882387
eBook ISBN: 9780062199126; ISBN10: 0062199129

Carla Kaplan, Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.”

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women—many from New York’s wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations—and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.

Ecco To Publish Pulitzer Prize Winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memoir

HarperCollins Publishers
2012-06-28

Michael McKenzie

New York, NY (June 28, 2012) – Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is thrilled to announce that it has won the rights to publish Pulitzer Prize winning United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s untitled memoir in a very heated auction. Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America. Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.

The deal was negotiated between Daniel Halpern, President and Publisher of Ecco, and Rob McQuilkin of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. Halpern says, “I can’t remember a more emotionally intense auction for a book, ever. I truly admire Natasha’s spirit, her graceful presence on these pages, which tell a story that no one is likely to forget.”

Trethewey adds, “I am honored to work with this venerable press, and with Daniel Halpern in particular, on a book I know will be difficult to write even as it seems that the past—and geography—have rendered me destined to do so.”

The book, which Ecco acquired the North American rights to, is tentatively scheduled for 2014…

Read the entire press release here.