In 2000, shortly before he left Chicago for New York University’s MFA program, poet Quraysh Ali Lansana was chatting with his friend Zahra Baker about Harriet Tubman. They knew that the abolitionist had suffered from narcolepsy due to a childhood blow to the head, and wondered whether God had talked to the deeply religious Tubman whenever she passed out. “Zahra and I theorized,” says Lansana, “that that’s how Harriet received the guidance to do what she needed to do.”
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His conversation with Baker planted the seed for They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems, Lansana’s thesis project and second full-length collection, due from Third World Press at the end of the month. For the next three years, as he pursued his degree and worked as an editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Lansana studied biographies of Tubman, listened to slave narratives to get a feel for the dialect of her era, and visited her home (now a museum) in Auburn, New York.
His return to CSU–where he had studied closely with the center’s founder, Haki Madhubuti, and earned a degree in African-American studies in 1997–is part of a master plan. “I’d been a part of the institutions that Professor Madhubuti has built,” he says, “specifically the Brooks Center and Third World Press, so I knew it was his goal for me to get my credentials and then come on back. But for me to return to Chicago there’d have to be a gig for me to fall in to.” When he was offered an assistant professorship in creative writing, he jumped at it, and then, unexpectedly, another position opened up. “I knew that the Brooks Center was a part of my future,” he says, “but I didn’t know–nobody knew–that I’d become assistant director almost as soon as I came back.” Lansana worked under Madhubuti for a year, and last July was promoted to director. Currently he’s working on acquiring Brooks’s papers from her estate and teaching in the school’s own nascent MFA program, the only one in the country to focus on the literature of the African diaspora.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Cynthia Howe.
