A letter from the editor.

Who's gonna make all that beautiful blk / rhetoric mean something.

--Sonia Sanchez, "blk / rhetoric"

We are: as we have for nearly 40 years, the contributors, readers, advisors, and editors of African American Review are gonna go on making beautiful music about black rhetoric. And how pleased I am to have been selected to serve as Editor of AAR, to have the opportunity to help shape the directions that African American literary and cultural studies are taking in the twenty-first century. In the few months since assuming my editorial responsibilities, I have become newly aware of the vastness and the variety of the scholarship on black literature and AAR's contributions to it. Outgoing Editor Joe Weixlmann's spectacular and indefatigable service to AAR for more than 27 years has left me with a rich, eminent, rock-steady legacy, so I am grateful to have Joe on hand as both "Editor Emeritus" of AAR and Provost of Saint Louis University to provide expert counsel. Joe was aided by Managing Editor Aileen Keenan, Book Review Editor Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Poetry and Fiction Editor Jonathan C. Smith; it is my privilege to work with these immensely talented and devoted academics. In addition, working with the AAR Advisory Board, the extraordinary scholars (many for years now, others new on our team) who serve as critical readers of manuscripts, and the numerous talented authors who write for our pages has filled me with both joy and honor--and I look forward to many years of the same.

Over the next several years, with renewed vigor, the editorial staff will work to increase the variety of academic disciplines represented in AAR. Our mission statement declares our commitment to publishing serious scholarly explorations of African American life, literature, and cultures as they emerge from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Given the growing interdisciplinarity of the academy and the rising global consciousness concerning the complexity of black experiences in the United States, we do well to examine such intricacies in our pages. AAR will continue to publish current and transformative inquiries into black life and letters across the traditional academic spectrum from Anthropology and Education to Law and Sociology as well as from more innovatively conceptualized areas of study such as American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies. In our treasured formal representation of the MLA Division on Black Literature and Culture, however, we remain loyal to our roots in literary studies. That devotion is unswerving.

In 2007, AAR will be 40 years old. At Saint Louis University, the editorial team has begun laying preliminary groundwork for several special anniversary year issues that will be among the first to display our reinvigorated enthusiasm for multidisciplinarity. I am confident readers will feel stimulated by the exciting, forward-looking topics we have selected for those issues.

My personal interests in reading about African American life and cultures through multiple lenses and interrogating them from diverse perspectives were formed by a long line of brilliant teachers from kindergarten through graduate school, not a single one of whom was ever called "conventional." Those origins were solidified during my 1980s and '90s training days as a black feminist graduate student in English programs at the democratic and radical state universities of Wisconsin (Madison), North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and Kansas (Lawrence), and later during the 13 years that I taught at the University of Washington-Seattle. Now I am devoted to sustaining AAR's much-deserved respect as the world's foremost journal on African American life, literature, and cultures. To do so, I welcome all readers' comments on the ways that AAR can improve and mature, challenge and inspire. As Editor, I know that I work most creatively as part of a team; AAR's steadfast readership is the ingenious team to which I am most committed.

Joycelyn Moody is Editor of African American Review and Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University.