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

By Carlyn Ferrari
(University of Virginia Press, 2022)

Anne Spencer was a pioneering African American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, and librarian at the all-Black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. She was also an important member of the group of intellectuals known as the Harlem Renaissance. As a civil rights activist, Spencer worked in association with James Weldon Johnson and rubbed shoulders with Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Drawing primarily on unpublished, undated poetry and prose, Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden represents a long overdue reassessment of an underappreciated literary figure. Employing ecopoetics as an analytical framework, Carlyn Ferrari recenters Spencer’s archive to cut to the core of her artistic ethos. Not only does this book 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 for Black women’s writings.

“A major contribution to studies of Anne Spencer specifically and to American literary and cultural criticism more broadly. Ferrari has engaged carefully with all the extant critical work in the field and pushed the level of scholarship to new heights. This book will prove of immense value to readers with an interest in the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements and to poetry readers, social historians, and cultural critics alike.” - Aldon Lynn Nielsen, The Pennsylvania State University, author of The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka

Interview with UVA Press

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