Carlyn Ena Ferrari

PhD, Afro-American Studies
Assistant Professor at Seattle University

Carlyn Ferrari is an Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University. Her first book, Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden: Anne Spencer’s Ecopoetics (University of Virginia Press, 2022) is a study of poet and civil rights activist Anne Spencer’s environmental ethos. In her research, she explores how Black women theorize the natural world and considers the intersections between Black feminist thought and literary ecocriticism. She hails from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds a PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Learn more


Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer’s Ecopoetics

By Carlyn Ena Ferrari

Anne Spencer’s identity as an artist grew from her relationship to the natural world. During the New Negro Renaissance with which she is primarily associated, critics dismissed her writings on nature as apolitical and deracinated. Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden corrects that misconception, showing how Spencer used the natural world in innovative ways to express her Black womanhood, feminist politics, spirituality, and singular worldview. Employing ecopoetics as an analytical frame, Carlyn Ferrari recenters Spencer’s archive of ephemeral writings to cut to the core of her artistic ethos. Drawing primarily on unpublished, undated poetry and prose, this book represents a long overdue reassessment of an underappreciated literary figure. Not only does it resituate Spencer in the pantheon of American women of letters, but it uses her environmental credo to analyze works by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dionne Brand, positioning ecocritical readings as a new site of analysis of Black women’s writings.

Interview with UVA Press

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