Namwali Serpell

And she was, I assume, one of a handful of Black students at Cornell as such.

And probably the only Black student who's doing a master's in English, maybe in the country at the time.

Wow, that's fascinating.

And she's talking about Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

Yeah.

Of whom, even though we now think of them as classics, neither of whom were actually fully established yet.

Right.

I think a lot of people also aren't aware that Morrison was the longest profession she had of all of her many hats that she wore was as an academic.

She was teaching Southern.

She went she taught at Howard.

She taught at Cornell at some point.

She ended up teaching at Princeton.

And she taught at Yale at one point as well.

So she's teaching this literature.

She's learning it.

She's writing about it.

She's writing a master's thesis about it.

And then she is, you know, at the same time moving into the world of publishing.

Now, in the world of publishing, she's being exposed to a new infusion of African literature.

So she talks about her exposure to writers like Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Kamala Lai, as she is beginning her career as an editor at Random House in New York City.