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Brent Hayes Edwards

Brent Hayes Edwards is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is also the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association; the essay collection (co-edited with Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin) Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004); and scholarly editions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Edwards was the co-editor of the journal Social Text from 2001-2011, and served as the Harlem Renaissance period editor for the Third Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014). In addition to his translation of Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, his most recent books are the scholarly edition (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Cloutier) of Claude McKay’s long-lost 1941 novel, Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics, 2017); and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism. Edwards’s other translations include essays, poems, and fiction by authors including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, and Monchoachi. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

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