Call and Response

Trudier Harris An author and lecturer on African American literature and folklore, Trudier Harris earned her Bachelor's degree from Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and her Master's and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.

In 1982, Harris wrote her first book, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Some of her other books include Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison; The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston; and Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin, which won the College Language Association Creative Scholarship in 1987. Harris's articles and book reviews have appeared in a number of journals, among them Studies in American Fiction, The Southern Humanities Review, and Callaloo Black American Literature Forum.

A resident fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., Harris taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English.

She retired in July 2009 after 36 years of teaching full-time. She also served on faculties of the College of William and Mary and Emory University. She wrote several books including The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. This title was designated as one of the "Outstanding Academic Titles" for 2009 by Choice.

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