Speaker Series – Tess Chakkalakal: Introducing Charles Chesnutt

In this talk, Tess Chakkalakal offers a fresh look at the life and work of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, the first professional Black American writer. His first novel was adapted for the screen by Oscar Micheaux. His stories of post-Civil War America are as relevant today as when they first appeared in the 1880s. Uncovering new sources, Chakkalakal evokes Chesnutt’s rise as a schoolteacher in the segregated South to joining the ranks of American realist authors. Working as a shorthand reporter, lawyer, and author, Chesnutt published six books and became known for fiction that has become essential to the development of the American short story form.

Tess teaches African American and American literature at Bowdoin College. Her writing has appeared in The New England Quarterly, J19, American Literary History, and many others. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Illinois University Press, 2011) and coeditor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition (West Virginia University Press, 2022). She lives in Brunswick, Maine.