Library Lobby
March 22-April 12, 2013

Arts of Respect (AOR) is an annual 2-week arts festival and competition in the visual, literary, and performing arts. Its focus is respect for humankind and to promote greater understanding of how the arts can help build more cohesive community at Drew University and beyond. AOR, established in 2009, is sponsored by Drew’s Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict, which endeavors to end hatred and mere tolerance, and promote mutual respect.

The Visual Arts Gallery showcases artwork created by students from Drew and from several local high schools illustrating what respect means to them.

In a world plagued by prejudice, hatred, and conflict, the arts offer a means of building bridges between and among people, of calling us out of ourselves into the imagination of others. The arts invite us to look at the world through different media, and to experience truths we might not otherwise contemplate, motivating us to constructive engagement with others.

Spring 2013

The Glen Sergeon Collection
of
African American Literature

The collection of African American literature created by Drew alumnus Glen Sergeon (CLA class of 1972) is clearly a labor of love. Eclectic and serendipitous, it was shaped by his personal literary interests, rather than with the intention of amassing a checklist of high spots. While at Drew, Sergeon met Professor of English Joan Steiner, who had been tasked with developing curricula that focused on African American literature. As he gratefully recalls, together they became students of that field, which remains a passionate interest. Sergeon also stayed in touch with former Drew professor Calvin Skaggs, and it was in the course of their conversations that he decided to donate his collection to Drew.

Under the guidance of New York book dealer Glen Horowitz, Sergeon learned to narrow his focus and sharpen his collector’s eye. The collection’s 75 volumes include a number of works by towering figures of the Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Richard Wright. Novelists and poets James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Paule Marshall, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, Derek Walcott and Al Young are represented, often with signed copies of their works. There are memoirs, biographies, anthologies of black writers, and studies of black culture. The collection also includes nearly 30 works of fiction and non-fiction (with uncorrected proofs for four novels) by John Alfred Williams, who became a personal friend of Sergeon. Another friend and correspondent was the poet Lucille Clifton, whom Sergeon, as president of Drew’s Black Student Association, invited to give a reading at Drew following the publication of her acclaimed volume, Good Times. She remains one of his favorite writers.

Three works in the collection are not by African American authors: Helen Bannerman’s children’s book, The Story of Little Black Mingo; George Bernard Shaw’s short story, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; and Rackham Holt’s George Washington Carver: An American Biography. The first was meant to entertain, the second to persuade and provoke, and the third to instruct and inspire.

The personal interests and private experiences that led to the formation of Glen Sergeon’s collection lend an air of intimacy to the whole. His deeply felt pleasure in these books, as well as his admiration for and empathetic understanding of the authors, seem almost palpable. In the words of Langston Hughes:
“Dream singers,
Story tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate—
My people.”

Lucy Marks, Special Collections Cataloger and Adjunct Assistant Librarian Drew University Library
March 7, 2013