Trudier Harris (born February 27, 1948) is an American literary scholar, author, writing consultor, and educator. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama and held the position of J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Harris is a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective."The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective".
Background Harris was born on February 27, 1948, in Mantua, Greene County, Alabama. She was the sixth of nine children born to Terrell Harris Sr. and Unareed Burton Moore Harris. Harris has three older sisters: Fannie Mae, Hazel Gray, and Eva Lee. She also has two older brothers: Terrell Jr. and Willie Frank. After Harris was born, her younger siblings Peter, Eddie Lee, and Annie (Anna) Louise were born.
Harris was named by her mother after a concert she went to see at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while she was pregnant with Harris. The concert was performed by an artist named Cordelia and Harris's mother was fond of the last syllables of the singer's name. Her first name was misprinted on the original birth certificate as "Trudy", which Harris did not discover until the mid-1970s; soon after the discovery her name was corrected to Trudier, on the document, and Harris believes her mother was the one who corrected the certificate. Her name is something she is proud of because her mother crafted her name.
Early life Her early childhood years were spent on her 80-acre family owned cotton farm in Greene County, Alabama. She learned how to can vegetables and kill hogs to help contribute to the family’s work. The family farm was successful, but her father still had to face prejudices of the day, and was jailed for an entire year after being accused of stealing a bale of cotton. Her father died when Harris was six years old from a heart attack on September 4, 1954. After her father’s death, Unareed sold the family cotton farm and moved herself and all the kids to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Harris and her siblings attended an all-black elementary school, which took some adjusting due to negative stigmas of being from the countryside. Harris and her siblings also had to eat the provided free lunch rather than being able to buy and pick their lunch, which also separated them from other students who were in higher economic social classes.
Harris participated in softball and basketball and maintained honor roll grades throughout her childhood. While the kids were in school Unareed worked as a domestic for white families, then later as a janitor and cook at an elementary school. For the majority of Harris’ early childhood she lived on Fosters Ferry Road and as she grew up her family moved to a house in Lincoln Park, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where her sister Anna still lives today. Harris’ oldest brother, Terrell, was the first in the family to attend college and he attended Jackson State University in 1962 on an academic and athletic scholarship.
Education and career Harris attended the all-black Druid High School in Tuscaloosa, where she wrote her graduating class's senior play. After high school, she attended Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and was highly active on campus. She became president of her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. She was also a student worker and served as an assistant to Dean John Rice, the father of future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In college, Harris also started to participate in local protests as part of the civil rights movement. She graduated in 1969 with a B.A. degree in English and a minor in social studies. Harris and three of her other siblings were able to receive a degree from a higher level of education.
After receiving her undergraduate degree, Harris attended a summer exchange program at Indiana University, which inspired her to go onto graduate school. She attended Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she received her master's and doctoral degrees in American Literature and Folklore in 1973
After Harris graduated from Ohio State University, she was hired as a professor at the College of William & Mary, where she was the first African-American tenured professor. In 1979, she started teaching in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)."Trudier Harris" , Encyclopedia of Alabama. Harris was at UNC until 1993, when she briefly moved to work in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory University until 1996, then transferred back to Chapel Hill, holding the position of J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor. Harris retired in 2009 after 27 years of teaching courses in African-American literature and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Harris became bored during retirement and decided to join the English department at the University of Alabama in her childhood town, Tuscaloosa. During her time at the University of Alabama, the Black Faculty and Staff Association established the "Dr. Trudier Harris Intercollegiate Black History Scholar Bowl". This is a yearly competition among surrounding universities in Alabama "to showcase their scholarly knowledge of African American History in a variety of categories". Harris served as a University Distinguished Research Professor of English until she retired for the second time in February 2022. After her retirement, she was named a Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama. Although Harris no longer works for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or the University of Alabama, she still is an avid fan of Carolina basketball and the Crimson Tide football team.
In 2018, College of William & Mary awarded her an honorary degree.
Awards and honors
UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching (2005) William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching (2000) National Humanities Center Fellowship for 2018–2019 Research and Study Leave at UNC for Spring of 2005 Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) Fellowship at UNC (Fall, 2002) Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) Fellowship to participate in a Leadership Seminar (Spring, 2002) SAMLA Honorary Member Award, 2021. SEC Faculty Achievement Award for the University of Alabama (2018) Clarence E. Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing (2018)
Publications
Books
From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Morrison (University of Alabama Press, 2023). Depictions of Home in African American Literature (Lexington Books, 2021). Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2014). The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (The Louisiana State University Press, 2009). Selected by Choice magazine as one of its "Outstanding Academic Titles" of 2009. Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (memoir; Beacon Press, 2003). Excerpt reprinted in The Chronicle Review, April 11, 2003. Selected as the inaugural text for the "One-Book, One-Community" reading project in Orange County, North Carolina, 2003–2004. Paperback edition issued Fall 2006. South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (The University of Georgia Press, 2002; 12 previously unpublished essays). Reprints: "Transformations of the Land in Randall Kenan’s ‘The Foundations of the Earth in Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 2, ed. Jelena O. Krstovic (Detroit: Cengage Learning, 2008), pp. 300–306; "Salting the Land but Not the Imagination: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer" in Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 2, ed. Jelena O. Krstovic (Detroit: Cengage Learning, 2008), pp. 278–82; "The Necessary Binding: Prison Experiences in Three August Wilson Plays" in Drama Criticism, Vol. 31, ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau (Detroit: Cengage Learning, 2008), pp. 272–79. Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2001). The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (University of Georgia Press, 1996). (Lamar Memorial Lectures) Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (University of Tennessee Press, 1991). A section of Chapter Six, on Beloved, has been reprinted in "Beloved, she's mine": Essays Sur Beloved de Toni Morrison, eds Genevieve Fabre et Claudine Raynaud (Paris: Cetanla, 1993), pp. 91–100. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (University of Tennessee Press, 1985). Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Indiana University Press, 1984). Chapter 7 has been reprinted in The New Cavalcade: African American Writing 1760 to the Present, Volume II, eds Arthur P. Davis, J. Saunders Redding, and Joyce Ann Joyce (Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, 1992), pp. 831–844. Excerpt reprinted in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Schocken: 1998), pp. 299–304. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). Chapter Three has been reprinted in Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays, eds John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1992), pp. 564–590.
As co-editor Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007—with Jennifer Larson). The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford, 2001). The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998 [June 1997]). The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; November 1994). [Edited essays on African-American women writers and topics related to the study of African-American literature. Harris wrote eight essays.] Afro-American Poets After 1955 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985). Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985). Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984).
As editor New Essays on Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988). Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1987). Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1986).
Contributions to books
"African American Lives: Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver". In Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, eds Emily O. Wittman and Maria DeBattista (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 180–194. "Untangling History, Dismantling Fear: Teaching Tayari Jones's Leaving Atlanta", for The Contemporary African American Literary Canon: Theory and Pedagogy, eds Lovalerie King and Shirley Turner-Moody (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 269–284. "Afterword: The Complexities of Home", Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the 21st Century, ed. Maha Marouan and Merinda Simmons (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), pp. 211–220. "History as Fact and Fiction" for the Cambridge History of African American Literature, eds Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: Cambridge, 2011), pp. 451–496.