Biographical Info about Leslie Marmon Silko (http://www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/silko/bio.html)

with links to an interview

Carlisle Indian School history with a before and after photo

Carlisle Indian School photos

Alice Walker

Biographical information about Alice Walker (http://members.tripod.com/chrisdanielle/aliceindex.html)

Interview with Alice Walker (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/walkera1.shtml)

This BBC site will link you to instructions for installing RealPlayer, so that you can hear this audio file.

Toni Cade Bambara

Biographical information about Toni Cade Bambara  with a link to information about the Black Arts Movement  (http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/bambara_toni_cade.html)

Roddy Doyle

A review/interview on The Woman Who Walked into Doors

Flannery O'Connor

Biographical information about Flannery O'Connor threaded into a writer's account of her journey to the places O'Connor lived and worked.  (http://www.literarytraveler.com/summer/south/oconnor.htm)

More biographical information and links for Flannery O'Connor  (http://mediaspecialist.org/index.html)

O'Connor's educational history with some photos

On Literary Periods

Realism

Notes on Realism (J.Lye)

Modernism

Some Attributes of Modernist Literature (J. Lye)

Postmodernism

Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature (J.Lye)

Comparison to Modernism (Klages)

On Language Variation, Literacy, and Power

"The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English" John Rickford.  A careful review of evidence re. whether AAVE is a creole ["whether a significant number of the Africans who came to the United States between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries went through processes of pidginization, creolization and (maybe) decreolization in acquiring English (the creolists' position"]), or a dialect ["whether they learned the English of British and other immigrants fairly rapidly and directly, without an intervening pidgin or creole stage (the dialectologists' position)"].

"Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English,"  Arthur Palacas.  An excellent argument for why AAVE should be seen linguistically as a distinct language and why this matters for teaching.  He argues that "language differences need to be taught, not in a remedial sense, but rather in an informative, scientific sense, and especially with the respect and joy that can come from belief in the language of the student."

"Hawaiian Pidgin Finds a Place in the Classroom"

"Hawaiian Sovereignty"

"Do You Speak American"  A PBS site with great information/activities re. varieties of American English

Jeopardy with a Twist:  and example a classroom game to help African-American kids with codeswitching while valuing their language.

Download Realplayer (free) to watch/listen to this video.

Hawaiian Creole English Grammar

Full on Pidgin   (a site with words and pronunciation for Hawaiian Pidgen/Pidgin/Creole)