Brent Hayes Edwards facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Brent Hayes Edwards
Edwards in 2009
Education	Yale University (BA) Columbia University (MA, PhD)
Occupation	Academic
Employer	Columbia University
Notable work	The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship

Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is known for his work on black writers and culture, especially how different cultures connect through writing and translation.

Early Life and Education

Brent Hayes Edwards went to Yale University for his first degree. After that, he continued his studies at Columbia University, where he earned both his master's degree (MA) and his PhD.

Teaching and Research

Teaching Career

Professor Edwards has taught at several universities. He taught at Rutgers University and now teaches at Columbia University. He has also taught at special summer programs, like the one at Cornell University and Dartmouth College.

Important Books and Studies

Edwards has written and edited several important books. His first book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, was published in 2003. This book looks at black writers from the time between the two World Wars. It explores how black writers from English-speaking and French-speaking countries connected. Edwards shows how translation can create new ideas and movements, especially for people spread across different parts of the world, like in the black diaspora. He talks about how these different places can lead to new progress, like joints in a body allowing movement.

Edwards also helped edit a collection of writings called Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies in 2004. He worked on this book with Farah Griffin and Robert G. O'Meally.

In 2009, he edited a new version of a famous book by W. E. B. Du Bois called The Souls of Black Folk.

Professor Edwards is also part of the editorial teams for two literary magazines, Callaloo and Transition.

In 2023, he helped write and edit the life story of jazz musician Henry Threadgill. The book is called Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music.

Discovering a Lost Manuscript

In 2009, something very exciting happened. One of Edwards's students, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, found an old handwritten story in Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was hidden among the papers of another writer, Samuel Roth.

For three years, Edwards and Cloutier worked hard to figure out if the story was real and who wrote it. They looked at old papers and letters and talked to other experts. In 2012, they confirmed that the manuscript was a previously unknown novel written in 1941 by a famous writer named Claude McKay. The book was called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem.

Henry Louis Gates, a well-known expert, said this discovery was "major." He explained that it greatly adds to the collection of novels written by writers during the Harlem Renaissance, a time when black art and culture thrived.

Awards and Recognition

Professor Edwards has received several awards for his work:

• In 2004, his book The Practice of Diaspora won the John Hope Franklin Prize and the Gilbert Chinard Prize. It also received an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize.
• In 2005, he won the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. This award allowed him to spend a year researching jazz music in New York during the 1970s.
• In 2015, Edwards received a Guggenheim Fellowship. This important award helped him work on a book project about "The Art of the Lecture."
• In 2024, he won a PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Award for Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the book he co-wrote with Henry Threadgill.