Biography
Sandra Jackson-Opoku authored the award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny (and the Women Whom Loved Him), an Essence Magazine Bestseller. She coedited the anthology, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced.
She is the recipient of a Billops-Hatch Research Fellowship, the Alyce Hunley Whayne Visiting Researchers Travel Award, a Mississippi Department of Archives and History Family Genealogy Fellowship, and the Lifeline Theatre Adaptation Fellowship. Other recognition includes a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines/General Electric Award for Younger Writers, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Research
Black Rice is a historical novel-in-progress that explores centuries-long connections between China and people of African descent. It follows an Afro-Chinese family across a millennia from East Africa to Ming Dynasty China, the Americas of the 19th-20th centuries, and mid-20th-century to contemporary China. Several chapters of the novel are set in the 19th-20th-century Gulf South: Key West, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta. I will trace the some of those Black-Sino contact zones by conducting archival and field research in Florida, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta. Major topics of investigation include the life of Key West freedman, Sandy Cornish, Chinese labor at the New Orleans Milloudon Sugar Plantation, New Orleans Chinatown, Cantonese railroad workers and shopkeepers of the Mississippi Delta, and the Black-Sino experience that emerged from these encounters.
