Making Elbow Room: Expanding the Range of Black Characters and Black Life in African American Literature.  A Discussion of the Short Stories of James Alan McPherson.  Note: McPherson is the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Thursday, June 19, 2025 - 1:30 - 3:30 pm

The chair of the plenary is Dr. Allen Gee; the participants are ZZ Packer, Diane Hinton Perry, John McCluskey,Jr. and Rachel McPherson (who is the daughter of the author). 

James Alan McPherson was born in the segregated south in Savannah, Georgia in 1943. He graduated from the historically black college, Morris Brown, in 1965, earned his LL.B. from Harvard Law School, received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and went on to teach at: the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard University; Morgan State University; Yale University; University of Virginia; and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he became the longest tenured faculty member in prose in the program's history. McPherson's first short story collection was Hue and Cry.  His second story collection, Elbow Room, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 – the first African American to be awarded this prize for fiction. He also published the memoir, Crabcakes, and the essay collection, A Region Not Home: Reflections on Exile. On Becoming an American Writer: Essays & Nonfiction was published posthumously, along with Korean, Spanish, and Italian translations of Elbow Room and Hue and Cry.  He co-authored the book Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture, with Miller Williams, and co-edited the anthology Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men, with Dewitt Henry.  Widely anthologized – including Best American Short Stories of the Century, selected by John Updike – his articles have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy and others. McPherson's additional commendations include a Guggenheim Fellowship, induction into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the inaugural recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and the Paul Engle Award. McPherson passed away in Iowa City, Iowa in 2016, where a city park was named in his honor.

Dr.Allen Gee is the D.L. Jordan Professor of Creative Writing at Columbus State University, where he also serves as the Director and Editor of CSU Press.  He is the author of the essay collection, My Chinese America, and is currently at work on, At Little Monticello: the Biography of James Alan McPherson.  His shorter pieces have appeared in Ploughshares, Cold Mountain Review, The Common, Terrain.org, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Zone 3, and elsewhere.   He is also at work on an essay collection, Did You See an Asian Man in the Adirondacks?

Diane Hinton Perry, a native of Washington, DC, ventured to the Midwest for her higher education.  She received her BA in English from Carleton College in Minnesota. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she focused on African American Literature. Her stories have appeared in the journals Ploughshares, Day One, and Short Story and in the magazine African Voices. She’s an alum of the Community of Writers Fiction Workshop, the Key West Writer’s Workshop Program, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the Vermont Studio Center’s Residency Program, and the Huston/Wright Foundation Writer’s Week.  She’s currently at work on a collection of linked short stories, one of which appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Ploughshares.  

John McCluskey, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of African American and African Diaspora Studies & English at Indiana University – Bloomington, where he taught fiction writing and literature. He is the author of two novels, Look What They Done to My Song and Mr. America’s Last Season Blues. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Ploughshares, Brilliant Corners, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, Best American Short Stories, Calling the Wind, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He has edited or co-edited three works of non-fiction including The Black Chicago Renaissance.  As one of its founding co-editors, he is an Editor Emeritus of the “Blacks in the Diaspora” series at Indiana University Press, a project that has published some fifty titles in the humanities and social sciences. He currently serves as an associate editor at the journal, and Board member of the Callaloo Foundation and Toni Morrison Society. He is at work on a series of short stories, both historical and contemporary.