ESU English Professor Recently Published

East Stroudsburg University is pleased to announce that Artress Bethany White, Ph.D., associate professor of English, has recently been published.

Dr. White’s book, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene, confronts brutal truths unearthed by the present-day descendant of an enslaved American family. It was published by University Press of Kentucky, and is currently available to purchase.

Following her ancestors’ enslavement in 1700s Virginia and North Car­olina, Dr. White weaves together data from Hairston family plantation archives and her Black Hairston mother’s inherited oral slave narrative to create searing poems on a history of Scottish genes and African ancestry. In her writings, White expands historical narrative far beyond Hairston plantation grounds to examine the lives of freed people who emigrated back to Africa to reestablish themselves in a Black nation, and to also chronicle her own life in the United States.

The publisher says the book invokes themes of heritage and the lives of mixed-race Hairstons, and the collection outlines the hardships many emancipated people faced in the U.S. as well as the ways Americans continue to encounter vestiges of institutional enslavement. An essential addition to ongoing conversations on race and racial (in)justice, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene lays bare our intertwined inheritances and what we leave in our wake for future generations connected by blood, nationality, or both.

For more information about the book, contact Dr. White by email at  awhite43@esu.edu.

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