1. About the Database

Black Short Fiction and Folklore is the most comprehensive collection yet created of stories from African and the African Diaspora. When complete, it will feature 8,000 stories and folk tales published in more than 15 countries from the mid-1900s to the present. In addition to these published works, the database features previously uncollected works and unpublished manuscripts by many authors. We have an impressive collection of fables and folktales, which arise from oral traditions that date back hundreds of years. Researchers will be able to follow their development in both Africa and the New World. We also have complete runs of selected literary magazines that feature short stories, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon, as well as many early North American black-owned and edited journals and newspapers. We present these texts in their original languages, including some, like the Gullah language of South Carolina, that have their origins in African countries and are still present in regions far from their source.

I would like to extend my thanks to the many remarkable individuals who have contributed to this collection-and in particular to all the writers with whom it has been my privilege to speak, such as Edgar Nkosi White, Femi Euba, Piri Thomas, and many others. To Grace Ogot, a wonderful Kenyan writer, I'd like to offer a special word of thanks. Grace called me one day to say that the opportunity to participate in a project like this was an incentive for her to finish some works she had abandoned and to translate others, originally in her native language, into English. My thanks to her for sharing her excitement with me and for being so enthusiastic!

Black Short Fiction and Folklore is part of the Alexander Street Literature package, which enables researchers to explore the rich literary heritage of diverse cultures from across the globe.

Isabel Lacerda
Editor

2. Editorial Criteria

We consulted many critical works to create this collection, including the following bibliographies:

• Post Colonial African Writers. Ed. Pushpa Naidu Parekh & Siga Fatima Jagne. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998.
• The Afro-American Short Story. Ed. Preston Yancy. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. First series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992.
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Second series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993.
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Third series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1996.
• Afro-American Writers, 1940-1955. Ed. Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1988.
• African American Literature: an Overview and Bibliography. Ed. Paul Q. Tilden. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003.
• A Black Canadian Bibliography. Ed. Flora Francis. Ottawa: Pan-African Publications, 2000.
• A Century of Fiction by American Negroes, 1853-1952; A Descriptive Bibliography. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer Publisher, 1969.
• The Afro-American Short Story. Ed. Preston Yancy. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Afro American Writers before the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1986.
• Afro American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Ed. Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1987.
• Selected Black American, African and Caribbean Authors: A Bio-Bibliography. Ed. James Page & Jae Min Roh. Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1985.
• African American Writers: A Dictionary. Ed. Shari Dorantes Hatch & Michael Strickland. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
• Dicionario de autores de literaturas africanas de lingua portuguesa. Aldonio Gomes. Lisboa: Caminho, 1997.
• A New Bibliography of the Lusophone Literatures of Africa. Gerald Moser and Manuel Ferreira. London: H. Zell Publishers, 1993.

A scholarly editorial board assisted in the selection of the content:

Trudier Harris (Ph. D., Ohio State University, 1973) is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She has lectured and published widely in her specialty areas of African American literature and folklore in the United States and abroad.

Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982); Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award); Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991); The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996); Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001); and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). She co-edited three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers and edited three additional volumes. She edited New Essays on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996) for Cambridge University Press and co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997); Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998); and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).

During 1996-1997, she was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2000, she was presented with the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Francis Abiola Irele (Ph.D. in French, University of Paris) specializes in Black African and Caribbean literature in English and French, with strong interests in contemporary thought in francophone Africa, within the context of black intellectual history.

Publications include an annotated edition of Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977); The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981; reprinted 1990); and an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1994). He has also published numerous articles and reviews and a recent volume of essays, The African Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2001).

He is a contributing editor to the new Norton Anthology of World Literature and is currently editor of Research in African Literatures; he is also general editor of the series Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.

Peter Kargbo is now the Resources Librarian for Special Projects at the Harrison Learning Centre, University of Wolverhampton, after working for many years as Librarian for Africana Studies of the New York University Bobst Library.

3. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many individuals with whom I worked in the creation of the database:

• The editorial advisors, for all their patience and commitment.
• The authors, with special thanks to those who enhanced their participation by licensing their unpublished stories, making Black Short Fiction and Folklore an even better and more comprehensive collection.
• The many publishers and institutions that helped us locate people in Africa.

At Alexander Street Press, the following individuals were instrumental in the creation of the database:

• Pat Carlson
• John Cicero
• Graham Dimmock
• Andrea Eastman-Mullins
• Barbara Jackson
• Michael Kangal
• Christina Keller
• Zoshia Minto
• Christine Murray
• Will Whalen
• John G. West III
• Ning Zhu

4. Subscription and Free Trial Information

Black Short Fiction and Folklore is available for one-time purchase of perpetual access, or as an annual subscription. Please contact us at sales@alexanderstreet.com if you wish to begin a subscription or to request a free 30-day trial.

5. Editorial Contact Information

Questions and comments about the content, including errata reports, should be addressed to the Editor at editor@astreetpress.com.

6. Copyright

Works in this database are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and all other countries covered by International Copyright Union (including the British Commonwealth and Canada), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including but not limited to professional, amateur, motion pictures, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, including information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

7. Cataloging Records

MARC records are available for this collection.