Melissa Barton

Melissa Barton is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters at Beinecke Library, Yale University. At Beinecke, Melissa has curated exhibits including “Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage” and “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library,” which was visited by thousands of people over its three-month run in 2017. The accompanying catalog Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album was co-published by Beinecke and Yale University Press. Melissa led a team of librarians from Yale, collaborating with the Black Bibliography Project, a multi-institution effort led by Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill, to create a linked data knowledge graph about Black American print throughout its history. Her scholarship has appeared in TDR and will be included in African American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.