2x American Book Award recipient
Past President, National Council of
Teachers of English (NCTE)
Past Chair, Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of
English and African American
Studies at Penn State
Keith Gilyard has passionately embraced African-American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator.
Since the 1970s, Keith Gilyard has made significant contributions to English studies as a writer, teacher, and participant in professional associations. His more than 250 publications include On African-American Rhetoric (2018, with Adam Banks), The Promise of Language: A Memoir (2025), and Discourse in Black (2025). He received an American Book Award for his biography John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism (2010). His dozens of creative works include the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2016) and the poetry volumes Impressions: New and Selected Poems (2021) and On Location (2025).
Explore his impactful talks on language, identity, and literacy.
Stay informed with Keith Gilyard’s latest reflections on literacy, education reform, and Social Justice. New ideas and insights are shared regularly through thought-provoking blog posts.
Never been all that easy to get Black doctoral students through English departments. They know....
A small casualty of COVID-19 was my first scheduled trip to China. In anticipation of....
Be assured that I had no intention of landing overseas and telling folks over there....
