Bookshelf
A young girl, standing at her mother’s side, listens to the lilting voices of her aunts and grandmother. Three generations of women are gathered in the kitchen preparing the Sunday meal. Drifting over the sounds of everyday cooking clatter are colorful, emotional retellings of the family’s journey from a quiet Virginia village to the city of Washington, D.C., as the Civil Rights Movement emerged in the 1950s. The child savors her family’s stories of migration.
Shaped by those early tales, Marta Effinger-Crichlow was drawn to Black Studies and English during her years at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1990s. Between classes, she got involved in the University’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre, a theater company that showcased the depth and breadth of African American life and culture. The creative environment helped to kindle her interest in the stage. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Pitt, she went on to complete a master’s degree in African American Studies from Yale and a PhD degree in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University.
Advancing through a career as a scholar, dramaturge, and playwright, Effinger-Crichlow noticed the scarcity of Black women’s migration stories in popular culture. Stories like those of her aunts and grandmother were practically nonexistent, so she decided to explore facets of Black women’s migration, focusing on quests—either real or artistically imagined—into the western United States, a region where stories usually revolve around cowboys and outlaws.
Her pursuit culminated in Staging Migrations Toward an American West (University of Colorado Press). Composed of migration profiles of four Black women, the book combines interviews and personal narratives with archival materials like old press clips, videos, and playbills. Effinger-Crichlow intertwines perspectives on race, gender, theater, and performance theory through these migration stories, which include the singer Sissieretta “Black Patti” Jones, whose Black female comedy troupe traveled the western states at the turn of the 20th century.
Effinger-Crichlow (A&S ’92)) is chair and associate professor of theater and literature at New York City College of Technology, where she shares her own migration stories and encourages students to embrace—and shape—their own journeys.
—Lisa Kay Davis
Bookshelf Briefs
SumSearch As a Pitt undergraduate, Jonathan Meck (CGS ‘08) was captivated by the brain-teasing number puzzle, Sudoku. In the years since, he has found joy designing his own numerically-based amusements that aren’t simply fun, but that also strengthen cognitive abilities, too. SumSearch (Schiffer) features Meck’s most recent creation, a game he describes as similar to a “word search with numbers.” It presents 100 puzzles of escalating difficulty levels, and it’s already gaining fans, both kids and adults. —Bethel Habte
Eighty Days of Sunlight Two Korean-American brothers reunite to investigate their father’s suicide and decipher the complex dynamics of their family in this debut novel by Robert Yune (XX ‘XX). Eighty Days of Sunlight (Thought Catalogue), in which the setting of Pittsburgh is prominently featured, also delves into the siblings’ relationship as it is tested by circumstance and fate. Yune, who teaches writing at Pitt, crafts postindustrial landscapes and authentic characters while weaving together themes of identity, loss, and the passage to adulthood. —Laura Clark Rohrer
Holy Legionary Youth Begun as a Pitt dissertation, this book explores the extremist fascist movement, Legion of the Archangel Michael, which rose to prominence in Romania as political tensions erupted in Europe and two world wars were fought. In Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press), Roland Clark, (A&S ‘07G, ‘12G) uses archival research and first-hand accounts to examine the significance and consequences of this fascist tide. He hopes this “opens up a fascinating and mostly hidden world of suspense, violence, loyalty, and passion in a very interesting corner of Europe.” —LCR