PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Autumn Womack is an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. The Philadelphia native is also a Central High school alumnus, and the scholar’s latest project at the Princeton University Library is turning pages across the country.
“The Toni Morrison collection, her entire archive of manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs, speeches, her entire {collection] opened at Princeton in 2016,” said Womack.
“Because of my intimate knowledge and work with the collection, they invited me to curate the exhibition, so it's been a lifetime in the making, three years of direct curatorial labor.”
“Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory” at the Princeton University Library sheds light on the creative process of one of our time's most influential, transformative writers. Womack is lead curator of the exhibit.
“I always knew that space and location was really crucial to her work,” she said.
“We can think of something like ‘Beloved’ which is perhaps her most famous novel, and place and a sense of place in home is so central to that text. But what I learned, which was really surprising — and what's on display in the exhibition — are the ways in which she not only wrote about these places, but how she also drew them herself.”
Womack said Morrison created hand-drawn maps of the fictional towns, homes and settings that show up in her novels.
“She would kind of make blueprint drawings of them,” said Womack. “She really had to visualize the spaces that she was then imagining her characters moving through.”
It took three years and a team of graduate students to select the collection from 400 boxes of archives. It comes at a time when the Nobel Prize winner’s books are at the center of censorship debates in some states around the country.
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“African American literature and AP classes in American and African American history are really being targeted and censored. I think that this show really recenters Morrison, as an important American writer and important Black American writer,” said Womack.
“This writer needs to be read, demands to be read, deserves to be read in all of these different ways.”
Womack said she hopes the collection will invite a larger audience of artists, scholars, and students to Princeton for the experience.
“I think this is also a really exciting opportunity for the broader community who might not always come to Princeton, or find themselves at Princeton, to really have an entry point for a name that is kind of a household name,” said Womack. “So familiar, and it just gives them a place to enter a foothold.”
The exhibit is set to open Feb. 22 at the Princeton University Library in New Jersey and is free to the public. She said the collection is open through June, but is always available for the public to visit.