B.A., Yale (1990); M.A., Columbia (1992); Ph.D., Columbia (1998). Brent Edwards writes and teaches on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz.
His most recent book is is the author of Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill (Knopf, 2023), which was awarded a 2024 American Book Award and a 2024 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award for Biography or Autobiography. Edwards is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).
Edwards has edited scholarly editions of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Cloutier) Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth. With Eve Gianoncelli, Edwards edited Écrire le monde noir, a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal. Since 2014, he has served as the Harlem Renaissance period editor for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
From 2001-2011, Edwards was co-editor of the journal Social Text, and he is also a member of the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association. Edwards is also a translator, having published English-language versions of essays, poems, and fiction by authors including Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, Paulette Nardal, and Monchoachi. His translation of Michel Leiris’s 1934 book Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017), was completed with the support of a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
