Hull, Akasha Gloria 1944–

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Akasha Gloria Hull 1944–

Poet, educator, feminist activist

Brought Academic Attention to Black Women

Celebrated African-American Women’s Sprituality

Poet Akasha Gloria Hull is one of the pioneers of feminist-centered scholarship in African-American literature. An expert on the works of Harlem Renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hull is a prolific writer for academic publications and journals of multicultural studies. She established herself as an academic under the name Gloria T. Hull, publishing many important feminist and literary studies, but legally changed her name to Akasha Gloria Hull in 1992 after discovering the name “Akasha” in a metaphysical text she read in Ghana. Since the 1990s, her work has focused on more metaphysical topics regarding black women in America, exemplified by her 2001 book, Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African-American Women.

Hull was born Gloria Theresa Thompson on December 6, 1944, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her father was a laborer, while her mother Jimmie worked as a housekeeper. Her mother had only the barest of a formal education, but loved the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Dunbar was the first important widely recognized African-American poet, and Hull’s mother could recite passages from his work verbatim. This love of the literary form was passed down to her daughter, and Hull emerged as an outstanding student and writer at Booker T. Washington High School, where teachers encouraged her ambitions. She majored in English at Baton Rouge’s Southern University and graduated summa cum laude in 1966.

After a stint at the University of Illinois, Hull went on to earn both a master’s and a doctorate in her field from Purdue University. Her dissertation dealt with the role of women in the poetry of Lord Byron, the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet. She began her academic career at the University of Delaware, in 1971, and rose through the academic ranks to a full professorship by 1986. For many years, she was a popular academic figure on campus, known for encouraging and championing the causes of black students.

Brought Academic Attention to Black Women

Hull moved west in 1988 to take a teaching position at the University of California in Santa Cruz, where she taught women’s studies and literature. The list of her published works was a lengthy one by then: in addition to numerous critiques on African-American women poets from Phyllis Wheatley to Gwendolyn Brooks, Hull also co-edited a 1982 volume, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. The anthology served as a guidebook to the emerging field. Hull, her co-editors, and the book’s contributors had championed the creation of this academic niche a decade earlier, after coming to believe that black women and their contributions—not to mention particular challenges—had been given short shrift by both black-studies and women’s-studies curricula at the university level.

For a number of years, Hull’s scholarship investigated the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s widow, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Hull edited Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, issued by the publishing

At a Glance…

Born Gloria Theresa Thompson on December 6, 1944, in Shreveport, LA; legally changed name to Akasha Gloria Hull, 1992; daughter of Robert T. (a laborer) and Jimmie (a domestic worker; maiden name, Williams) Thompson; married Prentice R, Hull, June 12, 1966 (divorced, 1983); children: Adrian Prentice. Education: Southern University, BA (summa cum laude), 1966; University of Illinois, graduate studies, 1966; Purdue University, MA, English, 1968; Purdue University, PhD, English, 1972.

Career: University of Delaware, Newark, instructor, 1971; assistant professor, 1972-77; Black American Literature Forum, advisory editor, 1978-86; [associate professor, 1977-86; professor of English, 1986-88]; Stanford University, visiting scholar, 1987-88; University of California-Santa Cruz, professor of women’s studies and literature, 1988-2000; chair of women’s studies department, 1989-91; professor emerita, women’s studies and literature, 2000.

Memberships: College language Association; Modern Language Association of America; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Selected awards: National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 1979; Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, 1979-80; National Institute of Women of Color Award, 1982, for All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, hut Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies; Ford Foundation Fellowship, 1987-88; American Association of University Women Grant, 1991.

Addresses: Home—Salinas, CA.

house Norton in 1984, and further explored Dunbar-Nelson’s literary output in Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, a 1987 book that was her first as author. It examined, in addition to Dunbar-Nelson’s career, the life and works of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Angelina Weld Grimke. Douglas Johnson, a poet, ran a popular literary salon in Washington, D.C. Grimke was the namesake of her aunt, abolitionist Angelina Grimke Weld, and also remained largely in Washington during the heady years of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. “With her study of Grimke and her book as a whole,” noted Jewelle Gomez in a critique of the book for Nation, “Hull opens up a very important discussion about the part sexuality plays in the growth and appreciation of black women’s writing.” Gomez also asserted that Hull’s writing possesses “an exuberance that reflects the optimism of the period…. Without being intrusive or trivializing, Hull conveys the impact her research into the lives of these women has had on her own work as a writer and as a reader.”

Hull continued her scholarship of Dunbar-Nelson’s literary output as editor of the three-volume Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, published by Oxford University Press in 1988, while her own poetry was collected and published in Healing Heart, Poems 1973-1988 the following year. Over the next decade, she began to branch out and explore other facets of African-American feminist life, and her efforts came to fruition in the 2001 book, Soul Talk. For it, Hull posed the same question to several women writers who were also friends and colleagues: “How do you see yourself as a spiritual being and how does that spirituality manifest in your life and work?” The respondents included renowned authors Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Sonia Sanchez. A critic for Publishers Weekly called the book an “intelligent work of the heart and spirit,” one in which its author “reveals the exquisite and reflective interiors of African-American women.” During this time Hull embraced her own spirituality. On a 1992 trip to Ghana, Hull discovered the name “Akasha,” a Sanskrit word simply defined as light or luminous, and took it as her name.

Celebrated African-American Women’s Sprituality

Hull saw the need for a book like Soul Talk that would examine what she termed “an outburst of spirituality” among African-American women among her generation. She dates the origins of this shift to 1980, “just when the civil rights movement and the early ferment of the feminist movement,” she writes, “were subsiding…. At the time, many concerned individuals were wondering what had happened to the energy needed to propel social change. We can now see that this transformative energy was moving to encompass spirituality in a deeper, explicit way, as preparation for grappling with social issues on a more profound level.” Hull dates the literary manifestation of this change as Bambara’s 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, in which a committed black activist undergoes crisis of conscience and faith, but finds help through New Age remedies that drew upon traditional healing rites. Hull’s book also discusses the influence of this new spirituality in popular culture, such as Oprah Winfrey’s popular daytime talk show and the self-help tomes of Iyanla Vanzant, which Winfrey’s show helped to popularize. “Essentially, Oprah has been making innovative ideas and healing modes available to huge numbers of people who may otherwise not have paid attention to them,” Hull writes in Soul Talk.

Divorced and the mother of a grown son, Hull lives in the Salinas-Monterey area of California. She is writing two novels and a short story, “Plum Jelly in Hot Shiny Jars” appeared in the 2003 anthology, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife. Many of Hull’s early works are being republished under her new name, Akasha Gloria Hull.

Selected writings

(With Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith) Editor and contributor, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, Feminist Press, 1982.

(Editor and author of introduction), Give Us Each Day: The Diari; of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Norton, 1984.

Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Indiana University Press, 1987.

(Editor and author of introduction), The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 3 vols., Oxford University Press, 1988.

Healing Heart, Poems 1973-1988, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1989.

Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African-American Women, Inner Traditions, 2001.