Sharon Monteith

Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the British Academy.

SNCC's Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (2020) won the C. Hugh Holman Book Award judged by The Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and the American Studies Network Book Prize judged by the European Association of American Studies (EAAS). Published by the University of Georgia in its Print Culture series, it recovers the print and publishing culture of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its activist literary history, notably in writing by Charlie Cobb, Jane Stembridge, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Jean Wheeler Smith, Bill Mahoney, Maria Varela, John O'Neal, James Forman, Gloria House, Worth Long, Peter De Lissovoy, Gloria Wade Gayles, Julius Lester, Richard Hall, Kathleen Collins, Jimmy Garrett, Denise Nicholas, and Mitchell Zimmerman. She talks about it here

In Patterns of Prejudice, historian Ray Arsenault wrote, "the stories that interest Monteith the most do not appear in previous works of scholarship or memoirs; her stories are the largely forgotten ones imbedded in language and literary invention. […] Taken together, this eclectic body of work propels Monteith down an innovative and imaginative road of discovery. Politics and literature, the personal and the collective: it all merges into a new way of understanding SNCC’s deep commitment to participatory democracy and the cultivation and empowerment of local movements. […] Monteith skilfully places SNCC’s print culture in the contexts of Black Power, the Black Arts Movement and the rising conscious[1]ness of postcolonial literature and the international African diaspora.”

For Emilye Crosby in the Journal of American Studies, “ In Monteith’s hands, even writing we know, like Howard Zinn’s The New Abolitionists, reveals new insights…. Thanks to SNCC writers and SNCC’s Stories we now know more of what SNCC did and learned and how they survived to carry on the struggle.”

For Steve Estes in The Sixties, “American Studies researchers and literary scholars will find much to like here... This book successfully marries deep historical research and thoughtful literary criticism in a way that should inspire and inform future works in the field”