Great Works of African American Literature
Margaret Alma Cox and Patricia Ann West
Made possible through funding from Affordable Learning Georgia and support from the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Savannah State University. © 2022. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Margaret Alma Cox was born in Carriacou, Grenada and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Baruch College, a Master of Arts in English from Brooklyn College, and a PhD in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is an Associate Professor of English/Africana Literature at Savannah State University. Her scholarly articles include “Alice Walker and Claudia Rankine: Reclaiming the Ocularity of the Self” (2017) and “Buchi Emecheta: Re-imaging the African Feminine Self” (2010). She also created the documentary, Zora and Janie of Eatonville (2022), which gives multiple perspectives on Zora Neale Hurston and the historic town of Eatonville, Florida, while examining the character Janie of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Patricia Ann West is a 36-year educator, recently Assistant Professor of English at Savannah State University, a Georgia HBCU, from which she graduated in 1976. With a Masters in Secondary English from Georgia Southern University and as a 1991 National Writing Project Fellow, she has genuine concern for using effective reading and writing strategies in literature and composition courses. She focuses research and writing on African-American literature, Gullah-Geechee literature, recovery projects in American literature, and the homegrown fiction of James Alan McPherson and Flannery O’Connor. She has been a certified e-Core instructor since 2014 and was a certified Georgia Educator until June 2020. In 2016, she was named an Outstanding Doctoral Scholar at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) where she became a candidate for the Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism. Prof. West has published poetry, articles, and chapters, and presented at workshops and conferences nationally, internationally, and virtually. Her publications include co-editing the custom textbook Collages: A Reader for Composition (Pearson, 2007), book chapters, reviews, journal articles, and local news and commentary for The Savannah Herald. In 2020, she published Still Water Words: Poems and Stories from Ancestral Places (2020) in which she shares her Gullah Geechee heritage.