Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books

An interview with the Kislak Center's Lynne Farrington about the collection's research applications, the importance of preserving physical works, and how Banks's archiving methods spotlight the Black literary community.

Posted on February 26, 2025 in Ask an Archivist

In this interview, Lynne Farrington, Director of Programs/Senior Curator, Special Collections, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, talks with Choice about the Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books. Lynne provides a fascinating overview of how Banks began collecting contemporary Black literature and explains the process of moving the collection to Penn Libraries. Lynne also details Banks’s involvement in the Black Womyns/Women’s Art Resource Collective (BWARC) and how the collection spotlights the larger Black literary community. Lynne further shares the Joanna Banks Collection’s applications in curricula and research, along with the curatorial process behind the 2020 exhibition, “Writing Across Genres: African American Women Writers in the Joanna Banks Collection.”

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Can you briefly explain who Joanna Banks is and how she acquired the titles in her collection? How did the collection come to Penn Libraries, and in what ways do its values mirror those of the library?

In 1984 she joined a Black feminist reading group, the Black Womyns/Women’s Art Resource Collective (BWARC), and was an important contributor to the group from its inception. Especially important were the bibliographies she began compiling based on her growing collection of books by and about Black women, which she updated regularly. These bibliographies were important in drawing attention to the growing oeuvre relating to the interests and experiences of Black women.

I was originally contacted in 2015 by Dr. Barbara Savage, the emerita Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Africana Studies at Penn, a friend of Joanna Banks, about the collection, and I expressed interest in learning more. After a couple of years of emailing back and forth, we finally arranged for a visit in early 2018 to Banks at her home outside Washington, D.C. From that point on, things moved quickly, with a visit by Banks to the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts a month later. By June the deed of gift had been signed, and my colleague John Pollack and I went down to pack the collection for shipment to the Penn Libraries.

As teaching and research in the academic realm has moved into areas like children’s literature, women and gender studies, Black studies, and food studies, among others, the Kislak Center and the Penn Libraries, more broadly, have sought to expand our special collections into these areas, which were outside the interests of earlier generations of curators. Joanna Banks’s collection covered these and other areas of study, filling a lacuna in our holdings and strengthening our ability to support new research.

On its homepage, the Joanna Banks Collection is described as a “collection of collections,” since it can be broken down into areas including women’s writing, children’s literature, and cookbooks. Why was it important to organize the collection in this way?

The cookbooks and the children’s books were always distinct collections, both in Joanna Banks’s mind and in their physical location within her home, so it made sense to maintain that distinction. The rest of the collection, primarily related to works by and about Black women, remained separate, although she did group them together by category on the shelves in her second-floor library and in the bibliographies that she compiled from her own collection. She also collected recordings of Black women poets reading from their work.

Banks’s interest in bibliographies was influenced by her own difficulty in discovering Black women authors to read. In 1986 she compiled her first bibliography, based on her own collection, which she titled From My Shelf: A Bibliography of Works by and about Black Women, and regularly updated it with new additions through at least 1995. From the very beginning she grouped titles into her own categories, including Women’s Studies and Feminism; Social Conditions; Bibliographies; Biography, Autobiography; Literature; The Arts; Practical Arts; and Diaspora. She would also create specific bibliographies, like the ones she did on religion, spirituality, health, healing, and self-help. Years later, in 2018, she created a bibliography of her cookbooks under the title From My Shelf: Black Heritage Cookbooks.

How is the collection maintained? Are you currently sourcing materials?

The books, chapbooks, pamphlets, and periodicals are cataloged and available through our online catalogue. They are grouped and can be located under the following headings:

• Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books (University of Pennsylvania)
• Joanna Banks Collection of African American Children’s Books (University of Pennsylvania)
• Joanna Banks Collection of African American Cookbooks (University of Pennsylvania)

The archival materials have been processed and are accessible through a record in our online catalogue, which points to the finding aid for Ms. Collection 1585.

The following is a direct link to the finding aid.

While we do acquire relevant materials in these areas, they are not cataloged as part of the Banks collections, which are considered as defined collections created by their collector, Joanna Banks.

In a video interview with Joanna Banks, Banks expressed her hope that the materials she donated would be used as part of a reference library, rather than a lending library. With that said, who do you see as the collection’s primary audience? Are collection materials now being incorporated into curricula and/or research?

Banks was interested in preserving this material for current and future curricula and research use, thereby maintaining the integrity of her collection. She was concerned that if it was circulating, then portions could disappear from the collections over time or be damaged by readers, such as young children.

We regularly share the collection with faculty and students through presentations and assignments using collection materials in our special collections classrooms and reading room. We also encourage the use of these resources for research by Penn faculty, students, and outside researchers. Selections from the cookbook and children’s book collections regularly come out for the displays we do around visits from classes and outside groups, such as the 2024 Juneteenth visit by Les Dames d’Escoffier Philadelphia, a philanthropic society championing women professionals in food, beverage, hospitality, education, and related industries.

I understand that you curated the “Writing Across Genres: African American Women Writers in the Joanna Banks Collection” exhibition that accompanied the 2020 Jay I. Kislak Symposium, Black Women Writing Across Genres in the Late 20th Century. What did the curatorial process entail? What was the opportunity you recognized to participate in the symposium and how did that come about?

Before the collection arrived onsite, I knew this was a great opportunity to bring graduate students into the process of exploring a new collection and mining it for materials for an exhibition. I reached out to faculty colleagues in English and Africana Studies for recommendations and they introduced me to two incredibly bright and engaged young women, Kiana Murphy (fifth year in English) and Destiny Crockett (second year in Africana Studies), whom I hired to work with me. Their hard work and dedication in co-curating this exhibition with me began with them going through the dozens of boxes of recently arrived and uncatalogued materials during the summer of 2019, as part of the process of choosing books and periodicals to populate the cases. They discovered interesting, unusual, and little-known works, some by well-known authors, and used them here to explore the depth and range of Black women writers over the past 50 years. It provided a valuable educational opportunity and led to the overarching theme of the exhibition, exploring the many genres of writing engaged in by Black women. We agreed to spotlight works by lesser-known but important authors as well as lesser-known works by prominent authors in genres with which they were not generally associated. We worked together to come up with the specific genre themes for the exhibition cases and then each of us worked on different pieces of the whole project.

Opening symposia are just one example of the type of programming that we organize in conjunction with exhibitions in the Kislak Center. This symposium was conceived, organized, and run by the exhibition curators, bringing together authors, academics, booksellers, and the founder of The Colored Girls Museum, along with an interview with the collector, Joanna Banks. The wide range of voices made for fascinating conversations and connections. We were grateful to have been able to open the exhibition and hold the symposium before the COVID pandemic closed everything down in early March 2020.

One of the talks in the 2020 Jay I. Kislak Symposium was titled “Collecting and Selling Black Women’s Writings,” which featured speakers from several Black-owned businesses. How did Joanna Banks’s method of archiving not only spotlight overlooked Black writers, but also booksellers and the larger Black literary community? How is the act of collecting both a personal and community-based practice?

Banks was interested in finding works published by small, independent publishers and counter-cultural organizations, not an easy task in the pre-internet age. For this reason, she looked to bookstores like Washington, D.C.’s Drum & Spear Bookstore, founded in 1968 as a local, national, and international resource for information about the African American community and African worlds. It played multiple roles, as bookstore, library, press, and community center, as well as a haven for Black authors like Toni Morrison, who would browse the shelves alongside Joanna Banks. According to a 1971 catalog, “reflecting popular interests, the Bookstore carries many works on the Pan-African Movements, African Liberation, Black Arts and Literature, and ‘Soul’ Cooking.”

The Black Womyns/Women’s Art Resource Collective (BWARC) played an important role in Joanna Banks’s life. She was one of the first members of the group, attending the first meeting in April 1984. BWARC: Black Women’s Art Resource Collective (A.K.A. “The Reading Group”) 1984-1994, published on the 10th anniversary of BWARC, was a collective effort. Banks was responsible for writing a history of the group, as well as designing pages, taking photographs of members, and providing old photographs for reproduction in this retrospective yearbook. It provides a list of all the books they read over this period, totaling 178, including seven each by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

In addition, Banks regularly attended readings by Black women authors at various bookstores throughout the region, taking photographs of authors she went to hear speak, including Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Angela Davis, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, and bell hooks, all of whom are represented in her collections. She attended conferences and symposia, like The Function of Black American Poetry: 1760-1977, held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977, where she heard from poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez. Finally, she created bibliographies that she printed and distributed to educate others on works they might like to read.

Could you speak about the value of preserving physical titles in an era of increasing digitization?

The physical works can tell us things about books and periodicals, like indications of readership, materiality, and condition, that a single digitized version will never be able to do. An encounter with the original material can also educate and inspire us in ways the digitized versions don’t. We have found that students and researchers come to see physical works even though the content is available online, and sometimes they come precisely because they now know that we have the physical objects. It is worth noting that staff on the Black Bibliography Project has been visiting the Kislak Center to consult rare and unique materials in the Banks collections as they compile their bibliography.

In her keynote address at the Jay I. Kislak Symposium, Professor Cheryl A. Wall wrote that, “The thrill is no longer the province of the collector; it is no longer the thrill of the hunt. It is now the thrill of discovery, the thrill that we who are fortunate enough to explore the treasures collected here experience.” How does the Joanna Banks Collection’s centering of Black women writers emphasize the “thrill of discovery” and push back against increased censorship and attacks against African American intellectual production?

To respond, I would like to quote Kiana Murphy, one of the co-curators of the exhibition and co-organizers of the symposium, now an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University:

Working with the Joanna Banks collection was the biggest highlight of my graduate career. From organizing the symposium to sifting through hundreds of boxes for the exhibit, I was able to think deeply about Black women’s literature, archival practices, and curation. My fondest memory was looking through boxes of periodicals and finding materials I had never seen: signed copies of Audre Lorde’s pamphlets, original Octavia Butler novels, and nearly every published copy of the magazine Negro Digest/Black World. As I sat beside tables fully covered in history, I had a profound revelation of the rich abundance of Black cultural production.

Libraries are important as repositories to collect and preserve the historic record and to provide access to these materials for students, faculty, and scholars across all disciplines as well as for the wider public. We welcome all to our reading room, to our exhibitions, and to our programming, and invite the local community to partake of these resources.

Are there any future plans or outreach efforts in the works for the collection?

We regularly share the collection with faculty and students and encourage the use of its resources for their teaching and research. The cookbook and children’s book collections come out for displays we do around visits from classes in food studies and on children’s literature, as well as with community groups. As mentioned earlier, we are making the collections available to the Black Bibliography Project.

Future exhibitions and loans to other institutions are always under consideration. There is a synergy around our various children’s book collections, as well as with the papers of Ashley Bryan (Ms. Coll. 1439), Atha Tehon (Ms. Coll. 1260), Wanda Gág (Ms. Coll. 310), William Steig (Ms. Coll. 1445), and Pippin Properties, a literary agent for children’s and young adult authors and illustrators (Ms. Coll. 1584), which continues to stimulate programming in this area. In a similar vein, all our cookery collections work together to provide a broad overview of this area of inquiry. We continue to work with faculty on their own programming around these topics and facilitate the process by using our public space to bring people in contact with these collections. We remain open to the many ways in which it is possible to activate not just Joanna Banks collections, but all the collections in the Kislak Center.

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About the interviewee:

Lynne Farrington is Director of Programs/Senior Curator, Special Collections, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, where she has served in various special collections roles since 1992. At Penn, she has been responsible for the acquisition of a wide range of collections, including Japanese illustrated books and prints; archives of photographers, authors, and artists; culinary and children’s books and manuscripts; and the history of American subscription publishing. She has curated numerous exhibitions; organized lectures, conferences, and symposia; and run major grant-funded projects like Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy. She oversees the annual A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography and is currently involved with programming at Penn around the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. She serves on the Board of Directors of A Book a Day, which engages the arts to promote literacy among underserved and diverse communities, and is currently Vice President of Philadelphia’s bibliophilic organization, the Philobiblon Club.

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Learn more about the Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books.

This interview was conducted by Ashley Roy. She is the digital media assistant at Choice.

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