A previously unpublished novel by legendary author Margaret Walker is coming next year, the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion Ledger reports.
Seretha Williams, chair of the English department at Augusta University in Georgia, has been restoring and editing Walker’s Goose Island for seven years, and the University Press of Mississippi is planning to publish it in 2025.
Walker was a key figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942, she published the poetry collection For My People, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
In 1966, she published Jubilee. The novel, which Walker wrote over the course of three decades, tells the story of Vyry Brown, an enslaved woman in 19th-century Georgia. It is considered a foundational novel of Black American literature; a critic for Kirkus praised it as “an affecting novel, carried handsomely by the subject.” Walker died in 1998.
Goose Island tells the story of a Black woman in Chicago during the Great Depression. Williams told the Clarion Ledger that the manuscript has missing chapters and some inconsistencies but that she doesn’t plan any major changes to the novel.
“Margaret Walker is a really important literary figure,” Williams said. “She’s understudied and also not understood as well as some of the other literary figures. Scholars like myself are attempting to recenter Margaret Walker from the margins.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
