Norm Minnick

On Etheridge Knight: Letters, Interviews, Essays and Review

Independent scholar Norm Minnick will examine more closely the life and work of poet Etheridge Knight, a leading literary figure in the Black Arts Movement. Knight struggled with personal and systematic racism his entire life, from an eight-year-long sentence at the Indiana State Prison for robbery, to limited access to publication and teaching opportunities in a predominantly white literary establishment. The causes and effects of racial injustice and structural racism in Indiana has been well documented in Knight’s poems in The Essential Etheridge Knight and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems. Minnick will contribute a more in-depth and personal consideration of these issues and their impact on Knight’s work by gathering and publishing additional Knight-related materials (e.g., letters, interviews, essays and reviews) housed at archives, libraries and the personal collection of Knight’s literary executor and partner, Elizabeth Gordon McKim.

Norm Minnick has served in faculty positions at IUPUI, Butler University, the University of Indianapolis, Marian University, Ivy Tech Community College and other central Indiana educational institutions. He holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Florida International University. He is the author of three collections of poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in dozens of publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, The Georgia Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Oxford American, and New World Writing. He has edited several books, including The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (2022) and On Etheridge Knight: Essays and Interviews (forthcoming in 2023).