Maureen Honey's latest book, Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, recently came out from Rugters University Press in August. Aphrodite's Daughters is Honey's eighth volume, and her third on the women of the Harlem Renaissance. Honey, a professor of English at UNL, is also a long-time WGS affiliate, and served as director of the Women's Studies Program from 1987 to 1992. In addition to the Harlem Renaissance, her research focuses on modernist American women writers, images of women in World War II, and women in popular culture. In fact, she created the popular course, crosslisted with Women's and Gender Studies, English 315B: Women in Popular Culture, and she regularly teaches courses in women's literature, women of the Harlem Renaissance, and honors seminars in literature and art.
Aphrodite's Daughters has received accolades from noted African American women's literature scholars such as Cherene Sherrard-Johnson and Cheryl Wall, who note the importance of Honey's recovery work in expanding our knowledge of modernism and its relationship to the Harlem Renaissance.
From the publisher:
Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women—Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery—who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké’s invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery’s frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett’s risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence. The product of extensive archival research, Aphrodite’s Daughters draws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery’s published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.Aphrodite's Daughters is available for purchase from Rutgers University Press.
