The (Non)Notable Network: Tracing Black Women's Poetry Networks in and Around Jackson, Mississippi.

In this essay, I situate Margaret Walker—deemed by Nikki Giovanni "the most famous person nobody knows"—at the nexus of what I conceptualize as the (non) notable network of Black women writers, specifically poets writing and publishing in and around Jackson, Mississippi, during the mid-twentieth century. This essay expands beyond Walker to explore the life and legacy of similarly obscured Black women poets, such as Ruth Roseman Dease, who was ironically misidentified as Zora Neale Hurston in a widely circulated 1952 archival photograph with Walker. Moreover, this essay seeks to consider who is eclipsed when the African American literary canon mimics the American literary canon and its exclusionary and exceptionalist structuring logic in privileging "mainstream" authors over lesser-known, local writers? Subsequently, I situate Dease within a literary lineage comprised of Black women writers who similarly faced difficulty acquiring and sustaining literary notability throughout their lives and most especially in their wake. The interweaving of the literary lives and legacies of Dease, Hurston, and Walker further link these writers and their poetic forms to the foremother of their writ-erly tradition and her chosen poetic form—Phillis Wheatley and the elegy. Dease's only book-length poetry collection, Scan-Spans (1967), and her other published works and their publishing venues ground the more expansive scope of this study, which evaluates mentorship and kinship networks and their significance amongst Black women writers rooted in Mississippi and those branching out beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]