Gary Edward Holcomb
News
Education
Ph.D., English, Washington State University, 1995
M.A., English, California State University, Long Beach, 1988
B.A., English, CSULB, 1984
Publications
Gary Holcomb’s scholarship and writing concentrates chiefly on the Harlem Renaissance, with much of his research focusing on the poet, fiction writer, journalist, and memoirist Claude McKay. Holcomb has been researching and writing about McKay for over three decades. His first book, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (University Press of Florida, 2007), is widely regarded as a foundational work on theorizing McKay’s modernist, queer, leftist, and Black transnational art. Reviews appeared in such journals as African American Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Holcomb is currently editing Claude McKay in Context for the Cambridge University Press’s longstanding Literature in Context series. Twenty-six Harlem Renaissance and modernist studies scholars are contributing essays on such subjects as McKay’s evolving literary aesthetics, independent politics, and progressive sexuality. As no other critical collection of McKay scholarship exists, the critical volume is intended to be a useful resource for readers, teachers, and scholars. Claude McKay in Context is due in 2027.
Holcomb’s most recent scholarship on McKay is Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer (Yale University Press, 2025), coedited with Brooks E. Hefner, James Madison University. McKay’s correspondents ranged widely, including Langston Hughes, Leon Trotsky, Marcus Garvey, Nancy Cunard, W. E. B. Du Bois, and H. L. Mencken, and the peripatetic author’s letters were dispatched from such sites as New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Marseille, and Tangier. Upon its release in September 2025, New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò threw a Letters in Exile celebration, with eleven notable scholars reading passages from the letters, followed by a reception and book signing. The Paris Review excerpted several letters, and Kirkus Reviews gave the collection a rarely awarded starred review. The Banjo Society-Claude McKay at Aix-Marseille Université broadcast the book’s publication to French enthusiasts of McKay on its website. For more information, see this interview with Hefner and Holcomb.
In November 2023, the American Legation in Tangier invited Holcomb to speak on McKay’s years in Morocco. And in December 2023, The Banjo Society-Claude brought Holcomb to speak on the letters for the Colloque Claude McKay: Passage and Crossings in Marseille, France, another city McKay lived in and where he set two novels.
In 2020, Holcomb and co-editor William J. Maxwell, Washington University, St. Louis, coedited McKay’s unpublished, circa 1929-1933 Romance in Marseille for Penguin Random House. Holcomb and Maxwell supplemented the Penguin Classic with an extensive scholarly introduction and annotations informed by a wide range of published and archival materials, with McKay’s letters playing the key role. Available in trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook, Romance in Marseille has sold over nineteen thousand copies worldwide.
Romance in Marseille’s publication became an international phenomenon. The New York Times published several articles on the arrival of Romance in Marseille, including a full-page analysis that appeared in The New York Times Book Review. The book was selected for the NYTBR’s Editor’s Choice/Staff Picks. Discussing Romance in Marseille’s groundbreaking portrayal of Pan-Africanist, disabled, and LGBTQ+ countercultures, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and New York magazine’s “Vulture” section reviewed the novel. It also placed third on the “Vulture” list of “10 Best Books of 2020.”
Reviews and features about Romance in Marseille appeared in such publications as The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was the topic of several BBC World audio programs, and CBC/Radio Canada's national interview show Q interviewed Holcomb at length about the Great Depression-period novel’s contemporary resonance. The Jamaica Gleaner, the newspaper that over a century ago called the world’s attention to McKay, published an editorial asserting that the novel’s arrival should inspire the abolition of Jamaica’s longstanding, homophobic anti-sodomy law.
In academic, activist, and literary spheres, Romance in Marseille has been welcomed as a major step forward in Black, queer, disability, and leftist studies. On Literary Hub, Henry Louis Gates Jr. included the novel on a select list of African American classics, signifying Romance in Marseille’s entry into the African American literary canon. The Los Angeles Review of Books excerpted two chapters, and an interview with Holcomb and Maxwell appeared in a subsequent LARB issue. Academic reviews have appeared in American Literary History, American Communist History, and The Modernist Review. LGBTQ+ activist site Lambda Literary (opens in a new window) praised Romance’s progressive “pansexual” spirit.
While the manuscript was being prepared for publication, the editorial board of English Language Notes (ELN) invited Holcomb and Maxwell to guest-edit a special issue devoted to the novel’s historic release. “Transhistoricizing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille” reads the text vis-à-vis such emergent critical areas as Afropessimism, maritime modernism, and the politics of pleasure.
Interested in the imbrications between the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation writers, Holcomb has edited two books on the intertextual exchanges between Hemingway and such Black authors as McKay, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin. Holcomb collaborated with Charles Scruggs, Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona, on Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (Ohio State University Press, 2012), and in 2018 he edited Teaching Hemingway and Race, part of the Kent State University Press “Teaching Hemingway” series.
Awards, Honors and Fellowships
In 2023, Holcomb formed the Claude McKay Society (CMKS), an American Literature Association author member society with presentations at annual conferences held in Boston and Chicago.
The Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences conferred on Holcomb the 2020-2021 award for Outstanding Humanities Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity.
For his 2017 Faculty Fellowship Leave, Holcomb focused on McKay’s correspondence and related materials. He conducted his sabbatical research in the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
In 2016, Holcomb was named National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Scholar for Ernest J. Gaines and the Southern Experience, an NEH Summer Scholar Institute conducted in the Ernest J. Gaines Center, University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
In 2015, he was invited to be a FIRST (Faculty-In-Residence-Summer-Term) Scholar in the Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder, where he taught a graduate course on “Queer Harlem Renaissance.”
Hemingway and the Black Renaissance was a Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries Outstanding Academic Title as well as a Significant University Press Title for Undergraduates.
Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance received an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award in 2007.
Holcomb served three Fulbright lectureships. He was twice posted as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies in Romania: at the University of Bucharest for the academic year of 1998-1999; and at A.I. Cuza University, Iași, for 2004-2005. He was Senior Fulbright Specialist, Department of American Studies, Dresden Technical University, Germany, in 2006.
Books
Co-editor, with Brooks E. Hefner. Claude McKay, Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer. Yale University Press, 2025.
Editor. Claude McKay in Context. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2027.
Co-editor, with William J. Maxwell. Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay. Penguin Random House, 2020.
Editor. Teaching Hemingway and Race. Kent State University Press, 2018.
Co-editor, with Charles Scruggs. Hemingway and the Black Renaissance. Ohio State University Press, 2012.
Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. University Press of Florida, 2007.
Guest-Edited Journal Special Issues
Co-editor, with William J. Maxwell. “Transhistoricizing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille.” Special issue of English Language Notes (ELN) 59.1 (April 2021). Duke University Press.
Co-editor, with Cheryl Higashida and Aaron Lecklider. “Sexing the Left.” Special issue of ELN 53.1 (Spring/Summer 2015). University of Colorado Press.
Recent Articles in Scholarly Journals and Chapters in Critical Anthologies
“Langston Hughes’s 1930s Short Fiction” and “Langston Hughes as Queer Harlem Renaissance Author,” two chapters in Langston Hughes in Context. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Anthony Reed. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“Great Depression Novel, Great Quarantine Read: Making McKay’s Romance in Marseille a Contemporary Classic.” New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture. Ed. Jesse Schwartz and Daniel Worden. Bloomsbury, 2022.
“Editing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille: A Groundbreaking Harlem Renaissance Novel Emerges from the Archive.” Editing the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Joshua Murray and Ross Tangedal. Clemson University Press, 2021.
With William J. Maxwell. “Transhistoricizing Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille: Introduction to the Special Issue.” ELN 59.1 (April 2021), Duke University Press.
Courses Regularly Taught
- AAS 1100 Introduction to African American Literature
- AAS 2100 African American Literature I: Slave Narratives to Harlem Renaissance
- AAS 2110 African American Literature II: Harlem Renaissance to Contemporary Black Literature
- AAS 3100 Postmodern Blackness: Identity and Culture in Contemporary African American Literature
- AAS 3110 Harlem Renaissance