Callaloo was founded in 1976 by its current editor, Charles Henry Rowell, when he was teaching at Southern University (Baton Rouge). He originally described the fledgling periodical as a “Black South Journal,” whose function was to serve as a publication outlet for marginalized writers in the racially segregated US American South.

Shortly after Dr. Rowell moved the journal to the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1977, Callaloo began to publish black writers nationwide. He had transformed Callaloo into an African Diaspora journal by 1986, when the Johns Hopkins University Press became its publisher, after he moved to the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) as Professor of English. After a fifteen-year tenure at Virginia, he moved Callaloo again—this time to Texas A&M University in College Station, where it has remained since 2001. At this point in time, the life of Callaloo—as a forum continuously publishing creative writing, along with visual art and critical texts about literature and culture—is probably the longest in African American literary history.

The journal is published quarterly in February, May, August, and November by the Johns Hopkins University Press

Johns Hopkins University Press

The Johns Hopkins University Press is the publishing division of the Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The Press publishes books, journals, and electronic databases...

. Authors featured in the journal include Betty Adcock

Betty Adcock

Elizabeth "Betty" Sharp Adcock is an American poet and a 2002–2003 Guggenheim Fellow. Author of six poetry collections, she has served as a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, NC and in the Writer-in-Residence program at Meredith College in...

, Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is a poet, editor for American Literary Review , and an English professor at the University of North Texas.His poetry has been featured in a variety of literary publications, such as: The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, and Poetry,...

, Catherine Bowman

Catherine Bowman

Catherine Bowman is an American poet.Her most recent poetry collection is The Plath Cabinet , and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Best American Poetry, TriQuarterly, River Styx, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Times, Crazy Horse,...

, Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan American novelist and essayist.Lalami was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her B.A. in English from Université Mohammed V. In 1991, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, and she went on to complete a M.A. in Linguistics at...

, Ashanti White, Marleen Barr

Marleen Barr

Marleen Barr teaches communication and media studies at Fordham University, New York City. She is notable for her significant contributions to science fiction studies, for which she won a Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1997...

, and Charles H. Rowell.

In addition to receiving grants of support from national agencies such as the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

, Callaloo has garnered a number of national honors, including the best special issue of a journal from the Council of Editors for Learned Journals for "The Haitian Issues" in 1992 (Volume 15.2 & 3: Haiti: the Literature and Culture Parts I & II); honorable mention for the "Best Special Issue of a Journal" in 2001 from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the American Association (Volume 24.1: The Confederate Flag Controversy: A Special Section); and recognition for the Winter 2002 issue from the Council of Editors for Learned Journals as one of the best special issues of that year (Volume 25.1: Jazz Poetics).

See also

• List of literary magazines
• African-American literature
• African American culture
  African American culture
  African-American culture, also known as black culture, in the United States refers to the cultural contributions of Americans of African descent to the culture of the United States, either as part of or distinct from American culture. The distinct identity of African-American culture is rooted in...
  
  

External links

• Callaloo on the Johns Hopkins University Press website
• Callaloo at Project MUSE
  Project MUSE
  Project MUSE is an online database of current and back issues of peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals. It was founded in 1993 by Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis and is a project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. It had support from the Mellon...