The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: The Wanderer: Toni Morrison and the Art of Creativity

Autumn Womack is a scholar of 19^th and 20^th century African American literature and archives. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), which was awarded Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize.

In 2023, she led the curatorial team for the critically acclaimed archival exhibition, Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which used never-seen archival objects from the Toni Morrison Papers to shed new light on Morrison’s creative process. Her curatorial and archival work has engendered two new projects: Her current book, The Wanderer, which investigates Toni Morrison’s creative process and practice through an exploration of her archive, and is forthcoming from Knopf. She is also collaborating on a volume of essays that reflect on the relationship between Toni Morrison and Black archival practice.

Her writing and research and writing has been published in journals such as Black Camera: An International Film Journal, American Literary History, Women and Performance, J19: A Journal of 19^th Century Americanists, The Paris Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement.