Keith Gilyard

A two-time recipient of an American Book Award, Keith Gilyard has passionately embraced African American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator. As a faculty member at Medgar Evers College-CUNY, Gilyard helped to establish (1986) the National Black Writers Conference, now convened biennially at that venue. He served as director of the Writing Program at Syracuse University (1995-1999) and as interim chair of the Department of African American Studies at the same university (1996-1997). Upon his arrival at Penn State in 1999, he began planning the seventeenth Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, which was held during the summer of 2001 around the theme “American Ethnic Rhetorics.”

Gilyard has authored, edited, or co-edited twenty books, including Let’s Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning (1996), John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (2010), and Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice (2017).