The Toni Morrison Society in Attendance at the 37thAnnual Conference of the American Literature Association on May 20-May 23, 2026, in Chicago

On Thursday, May 21, the Society will host two scholarly panels: “The Prefatory Voice of Toni Morrison” and “Reenvisioning The American Body Politic.” These panels will feature respected national and international Morrison scholars who will present insightful perspectives on rarely researched areas of Morrison’s work. The prefatory voice that Morrison brings to her own works and the works of others opens up spaces for critical inquiryof national and world literatures across genres and traditions. Exploring the ways that Morrison incorporates cultural and natural ways of healing the body in her novels connects the rich cultural layers of Morrison’s texts with a compelling political statement and helps us reenvision healing as both a biological and cultural practice.

On Friday May 22, at the reception sponsored by the African American Literature and Culture Society, the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for the best the Best Single-Authored Book for 2024 and 2025. The Society is proud to honor these excellent contributions to Morrison scholarship.

SCHOLARLY PANELS:

Panel One: The Prefatory Voice of Toni Morrison
Session 1K, Salon 5
8:30 – 9:50 am
Chair: Emmanuelle Andres, La Rochelle Université, France, Vice-president and Program Chair of the Toni Morrison Society
This panel seeks to explore Morrison’s critical, contextual, and curatorial presence in the introductions she authored—whether to her own novels or to the works of others. Indeed, Morrison’s introductions offer a distinctive register of her voice: reflective, interpretive, and charged with authority. Her prefatory writings to her own novels reframe the works for new audiences, offering critical hindsight and interpretive direction these. These prefatory texts invite us to consider Morrison not only as novelist, essayist, and editor, but as a writer of “thresholds”—authoring the critical passages that shape how readers encounter texts.

Panelists:

1. Alex Gjaja, Brown University. “Slogging Through” Huckleberry Finn and Re-Writing Othello: Toni Morrison and ‘the Classics.”
2. Devon Clifton, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “’My telling can’t hurt you’: Morrison’s Animate Textuality.”
3. Kristian Maye, Mount Holyoke College. “White message, ‘Abiding’ Black Envelope: Playing in the Dark as Preface to the American Literary Project.”
4. Hayley O’Malley, Rice University. “Toni Morrison as Film Curator.”

Panel Two (A/B): Reenvisioning the American Body Politic: Toni Morrison’s Fiction I
Session 4G, Salon 12 Session
1:00-2:20 pm
Chair: Carolyn Denard, Toni Morrison Senior Fellow, Africa Institute and Board Chair of the Toni Morrison Society
This panel (sessions A and B) seeks to address Toni Morrison’s representation of trauma (physical, psychological, generational) as a national, as well as individual and communal, injury. While critiques of medical institutions and authority abound in her novels, traditional healing practices, herbal medicine, and communal rituals emerge as counter-narratives to state-sanctioned neglect of violence. Reflecting the symbolic function of midwifery, folk medicine, and other practices, Morrison’s fiction is a site of medical humanities inquiry, highlighting the entanglement of health, justice, and citizenship, helping the reader reimagine the origins and futures of the American body politic.

Panelists—Session A

1. Mattie Hemming, Rice University. "Fictions of Protection and Technologies of Perception: Paradise’s Late-Twentieth-Century Abortion".
2. Dana Williams, Howard University. “What Literature Knows about Care in the Wake of Violence: Reading Toni Morrison's Home for Medical Humanities Futures.” Dana Williams, Howard University.

Panel TWO Session B: Reenvisioning the American Body Politic : Toni Morrison’s Fiction ll
Session 5L, Salon 6
2:30-3:50 pm
Chair: Carolyn Denard, Toni Morrison Senior Fellow, Africa Institute and Board Chair of the Toni Morrison Society

Panelists—Session B:

1. Hayon Cho, Northwestern University. “A‘Cold’ yet ‘Green’House: Black Girlhood Reading as Remedy in The Bluest Eye.
2. Martha J. Cutter, University of Connecticut. “Excavating Traces of an Africanist Culture: Alternative Healing and Women’s Trauma in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon.”

TONI MORRISON SOCIETY BOOK PRIZES

The Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for the Best Single-Authored book for 2024 will be presented to Dr. Marilyn Sanders Mobley for her book Toni Morrison and the Geopolitics of Place, Race, and Belonging, 2024 (Temple University Press).

The Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for the Best Single-Authored Book for 2025 will be presented to Dr. Dana A. Williams for her book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, 2025 (Amistad).