The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan, Vol. 39 » (New Edition)

Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and author of The Power of the Porch (Georgia) and Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison.

Southern literature is often celebrated for its "told," rather than "written," qualities. Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among