To Tell Her Glories with a Faithful Tongue
Wake Forest University ZSR Library Special Collections
Samuel T. Gladding Fellow
Fall 2024-April 2025
To Tell Her Glories with a Faithful Tongue, pays homage to the literary and cultural contributions of Black Women Writers through the lens of archival material analysis and letterpress printing. This work of art in book form features student text inspired by course readings and analysis of primary sources from Special Collections, including the Maya Angelou Film & Theater Collection, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and pamphlets. To Tell Her Glories with a Faithful Tongue embodies connectivity of thought, creativity, ideas, and reflection through poetry, letterpress, printmaking, and materiality.
Thank you to the Samuel T. Gladding Endowment for Creating Pathways for Student Engagement and Artist Creativity
Many Thanks to Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Senior Director, Special Collections & Archives Z. Smith Reynolds Library
Megan Mulder, Special Collections Librarian, Z. Smith Reynolds Library
Dr. Rian Bowie, Associate WFU Teaching Professor , Department of English
A Very Special Thank you to Craig Fansler, Preservation Librarian Z. Smith Reynolds for guiding students through the letter press process.
Student Reflection
Mothering Through Imagination
“Raising a black boy makes you sit down and think,” Maya Angelou once said. In the
same way, our Special Collections piece compelled us to pause, reflect, and honor Angelou’s
profound and intricate legacy as a mother. As someone terrible with names, my group project not
only allowed me to memorize those of my three hardworking members but also allowed me to
understand our abilities, ushering us to craft a project that incorporated the ideas and work of all.
We succeeded, and alas, the birth of Angelou’s son led to the birth of our work,
“Mothering Through the Eyes of Maya Angelou.”
We began working on our project during our textual analysis of Maya Angelou’s The
Heart of a Woman, and thus, we had Angelou’s history of motherhood on our minds. Together,
we scoured the autobiography for poignant quotes. We found “the black mother perceives
destruction at every door” (Angelou 40). Then, “the black mother herself is not beyond her own
suspicions” (40). Soon after, “each sunrise brought a day without hope” (100). Others sprouted
up as well. From her words came the quote that became the common thread between them all:
“Raising a black boy makes you sit down and think”—a quote that we adored so much that it
became the foundation for our work (96). We repeated the sentence three times throughout the
piece to emphasize the many thoughts and lessons that were sure to have crowded Angelou’s
mind. In our piece, we arranged her quotes and weaved our own interpretations within."
Student Reflection
"Going into this project, I wanted to honor the creativity of the Black woman or Black women we
would be taking inspiration from. I think Black women's creative ways and methods are very
intentional and directly correlated to the work they put out. Even though the analysis of a text
can be subjective, I wanted to make sure my group and I captured the intentions behind their
work. When my group decided to use one of Philis Wheatley’s letters to Susannah Wheatley I
was really excited. During the class discussions of Honoree Jeffers, The Age of Phillis I really
liked the attention to Jeffers's manipulation of Phillis’s poems. I think she did a great job of
capturing the message and meaning of Phillis’s work while still incorporating creativity into it.
So, when the idea of using a letter from Phillis to Susannah was brought up I thought we could
do some really cool and interesting things with it.
We went with highlighting words that praised or complimented Susannah in the letter Phillis sent
her. I think this was a great way of manipulating the letter because those words speak volumes
about the condition Phillis was in. While not treated like other slaves during the time period,
there is a great appreciation for Susannah. Phillis knows that her position is unique from chattel
slavery but she also knows the power her master and mistress hold so there is a role to be played
so that she does not receive punishment. The font we used to capitalize the words of Phillis hasan older feel due to it looking like calligraphy but it also speaks to the space Phillis had to
operate in. This is seen in her other poems but Phillis was given the opportunity of education,
reading, and writing, a privilege of the white elite at the time. The capitalization represents how
she had to find places where she could express herself outside of the role given to her by her
master and mistress."
Student Reflection
"When we were first assigned the broadside project, I knew right away what I wanted to do. I love poetry so I proposed that we use quotes from Black women authors. I felt that their voices and experiences would allow me to create a new narrative that was both powerful and meaningful. The idea was to pull lines from different authors across time periods, each representing a distinct era in Black history. The authors we chose were Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Phillis Wheatley. These authors are not only important to African American literature, but they also offer a diversity of perspectives on themes like identity, womanhood, and the struggle against oppression.
Once we had these authors in mind, the next step was to find lines from their work that resonated with us. It took some time, but eventually, we found a common theme of light and dark imagery. This was a recurring theme in the works of these authors, and we realized that it could serve as a powerful lens while we explore the experience of Black women. The "darkness" we focused on was multifaceted. It referred not only to the literal struggles that Black women face—such as oppression, marginalization, and violence—but also to the metaphorical darkness: the erasure of Black women from history and culture. At the same time, we also noticed a theme of light, representing hope, resilience, and the strength of womanhood."
Student Reflection
Getting to engage with Sauda Mitchell’s work and then collaborate with other students to create our own work was a truly unique and memorable opportunity for an English class. This assignment challenged us to rethink the function of words and poetry beyond a typical paper. We had been discussing the role of imagination in relation to Black, female authors and poets throughout the semester, so to use our own imaginations to honor some of their work in a creative way felt like a perfect synthesis of the course.
When Grace, Jason, and I began brainstorming for our project, we knew early on that we wanted to combine ideas from various poets from different eras into the finished project. We selected works from Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Audrey Lorde (1934 - 1992), and Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It was a rewarding experience to reread their works while simultaneously finding ways to connect and relate them to other works from Black, female poets. We found there were more obvious thematic patterns in regard to their experiences with intersectionality and womanhood, but we also found patterns in the metaphors and allusions they used regarding sunlight, light, and darkness. The ways they connected their Black experiences with darkness and their perseverance against opposition with sunlight and rising inspired us to focus on these patterns and include them in a way that read fluently as a poem.