Black Aliveness: Centering the Stories over the Teller in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

This essay encompasses the critical component of my thesis, a series of linked short stories about Black Millennial life during the Obama era. In preparation for writing and editing these stories, I read several story collections and discussed a few of them below, couching the literary analysis within a personal history of reading and listening to stories as a child. Every writer runs into challenges, so in considering what to focus on in these collections I looked at ways these writers approach challenges that I have come across in my own efforts to tell stories. The essay mentions several authors but focuses primarily on short fiction by ZZ Packer, Danielle Evans, and Jamel Brinkley. It considers the importance of Black storytelling in a nation where the most far reaching forms of media have often allowed for very limited depictions of Black life in its multiplicity.