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Keith Gilyard
Keith Gilyard was born in 1952 in New York and is currently
a professor of English at Penn State University. Gilyard has written and
lectured extensively on language and literacy for over 30 years. He is the
author or editor of numerous books, including Voices of the Self,
for which he received an American Book Award in 1992.
Gilyard is especially interested in language education for African Americans
and other people of color. In his poetry and the books of essays he has
edited, and particularly in his work Voices of the Self, he reflects
on the rhetoric of race and on his personal history. Having grown up "a
Native Black English speaker in an urban public school environment" who
acquired not only strong Standard English language skills, but the "socio-linguistic
competence" to be successful in a variety of settings, Gilyard explores
the question of the place of culture, race, and language in the classroom.
Voices of the Self alternates chapters about Gilyard's own life and
education with chapters examining scholarship on language acquisition and
linguistic development. One of the key ideas underlying both sections is
Gilyard's belief that the language and experiences of children must have
a legitimate place in the classroom. He writes: "A pedagogy is successful
only if it makes knowledge or skills achievable while at the same time allowing
students to maintain their own sense of identity." As his own story illustrates,
young African American boys can feel that there is no way to truly be themselves
and also succeed in school. Gilyard writes that "a failure to learn Standard
English is more accurately termed an act of resistance: Black students affirming,
through Black English, their sense of self in the face of a school system
and society that deny the same."
Gilyard cites several writers and books that influenced him and echoed some
of his own experiences and beliefs. Richard Wright's Black Boy is,
for him, as for many male African American writers of his generation, "always
at the top of the list." Other memoirs that were particularly resonant include
Richard Rodriquez's Hunger of Memory and John Edgar Wideman's Brothers
and Keepers. The work of Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl in teaching
groups of inner-city children showed him ways to honor students' out-of-school
language and experiences. And as a poet, Gilyard remembers Haki Madhubuti's
We Walk the Way of the World as the "single most influential volume
of poetry I read as a teenager." As a mature poet, he has been influenced
deeply by Nikki Giovanni, Quincy Troupe, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda,
and Aimé Césaire.
Works by the Author
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Work:
Poemographies