James Smethurst

James Smethurst is a Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946; The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s; The African American Roots of Modernism; Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity; and Behold the Land: A History of the Black Arts Movement in the South. He co-edited Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States,  Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, and SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. His current project studies the interchange between the Black Arts Movement in Britain and in the United States.