Raymond Keith Gilyard (born 1952 in New York City) is a prominent writer and American professor of English who teaches and researches in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and African American literature. Interested in the complex interplay among race, ethnicity, language, writing, and politics, Gilyard's work investigates the differences between authentic student voice and the dominant discourse of the academy. His primary interest lies in identifying intersections of African American English and composition practices. Advocating African American English as a legitimate discourse, Gilyard is a prominent voice in the movement to recognize ethnic and cultural discourses other than Standard English as valid. As a literary scholar, his interests have been in the interplay between African American literature and rhetorical criticism and in bio-critical work.

Gilyard received his Bachelor of Science degree from City University, his Masters of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and his doctorate (EdD) at New York University, this last degree under the mentorship of Gordon M. Pradl. His first college teaching appointment was at LaGuardia Community College in 1980. In 1981, Gilyard became a faculty member at CUNY, Medgar Evers College, where in 1986 he helped to launch the National Black Writers Conference series. He continued at CUNY as a teacher and writing program administrator until 1994, when he took a position as professor of writing and English and director of the writing program at Syracuse University. Since 1999, he has been a professor of English at Penn State University.

Throughout his career, Gilyard has been actively involved in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), including serving on the editorial board and the executive committee and will serve as NCTE president in 2011-2012 during its centennial. He has also worked significantly with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition, for which he served as Chair in 2000.

Also notable among Gilyard's professional accomplishments are his receipt of the American Book Award (1992) for his monograph Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence, his distinction as Distinguished Professor at Penn State (2005), the Penn State Class of 1933 Medal of Distinction in the humanities (2005), and an Arts nf Humanities Medal (2006). In 2005, Gilyard was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent.

 

True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy
Click to Order via Amazon

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (March 23, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415887178
ISBN-13: 978-0415887175
Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches


In True to the Language Game, Keith Gilyard, one of the major African American figures to emerge in language and cultural studies, makes his most seminal work available in one volume. This collection of new and previously published essays contains Gilyard’s most relevant scholarly contributions to deliberations about linguistic diversity, cultural identity, critical literacy, writing instruction, literary texts, and popular culture. The volume also features contemporary treatises on such timely topics as "students’ right to their own language," code-switching pedagogy, and political discourse surrounding the rise of Barack Obama. Gilyard weaves together serious analysis, theoretical work, policy discussions, and personal reflections on the interplay of language, literacy, and social justice to make True to the Language Game essential reading for students and scholars in rhetorical studies, composition studies, applied linguistics, and education. 

Keith Gilyard - True to the Language Game from Routledge

 

John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism
Click to Order via Amazon

Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: University of Georgia Press (May 15, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0820335134
ISBN-13: 978-0820335131
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches

Read an AALBC.com Review 

John Oliver Killens's politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens's times and literary achievement'from the Old Left to the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Figuring prominently in these pages are the many important African American artists and political figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s'W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.

 

Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy
Click to Order via Amazon

Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (May 5, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0809328542
ISBN-13: 978-0809328543
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches

Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.

In this study, author Keith Gilyard examines the strategies of Socratic Commitment (a relentless examination of received wisdom), Prophetic Witness (an abiding concern with justice and the plight of the oppressed), and Tragicomic Hope (a keep-on-pushing sensibility reflective of the African American freedom struggle). Together, these rhetorical strategies comprise an updated form of cultural criticism that West calls prophetic pragmatism.

This volume, which contains the only interview in which Cornel West directly addresses the field of composition, sketches the development of Cornel West’s theories of philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies and restates the link between Deweyan notions of critical intelligence and the notion of critical literacy developed by Ann Berthoff, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. Gilyard provides examples from the classroom to illustrate the possibilities of Socratic Commitment as part of composition pedagogy, shows the alignment of Prophetic Witness with traditional aims of critical composition, and in his chapter on Tragicomic Hope, addresses African American expressive culture with an emphasis on music and artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Kanye West.

The first book to comprehensively connect the ideas of one of America's premier scholars of religion, philosophy and African American studies with composition theory and pedagogy, Composition and Cornel West will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in race, class, critical literacy, and the teaching of writing.

 

Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens
Click to Order via Amazon

Hardcover: 180 pages
Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr (April 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814330576
ISBN-13: 978-0814330579
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches

No serious history of the development of the African American novel from the 1950s onward can be written without reference to John Oliver Killens. A two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild, Killens was regarded by many as a spiritual father who inspired a generation of African American novelists with his politically charged works. Seeking to strengthen our understanding of this important literary figure, Keith Gilyard departs from standard critical frameworks to reveal Killens's novels as artful renderings of rich African American rhetorical forms and verbal traditions. Rejecting the "pure art" position, Killens sought to articulate Black heroism particularly within a family or community context, offering a set of values he deemed liberatory. He focused on rendering noble and polemical characters, and his work represents a distinguished fusion of sociopolitical persuasion (rhetoric) and literary artifact (poetics).

 

Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
Click to Order via Amazon

Paperback: 178 pages
Publisher: Wayne State University Press (August 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814322255
ISBN-13: 978-0814322253
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches

A unique blend of memoir and scholarship, Keith Gilyard's "Voices of the Self" is a penetrating analysis of the linguistic and cultural "collision" experienced by African-American students in the public education system. Gilyard examines black students "negotiate" their way through school and discusses the tension between the use of Black English and Standard English, underlining how that tension is representative of the deeper conflict that exists between black culture and white expectations. Vivid descriptions—often humorous, sometimes disturbing, always moving—of Gilyard's own childhood experiences in school and society are interlaced with chapters of solid sociolinguistic scholarship.

Encompassing the perspectives of both the "street" and the "academy," "Voices of the Self" presents an eloquent argument for cultural and linguistic pluralism in American public schools.

Related Links

Interview with Keith Gilyard
http://www.nathanielturner.com/interviewwithkeithgilyard.htm