Suzanne Whitmore Jones (1950– )

Jones was born on May 26, 1950, and grew up in Surry County, the daughter of a farmer and a government worker. Located on the James River near the Chesapeake Bay, Surry is part of the waterway-based culture of the coastal lowland South. It was also a site of turmoil during the mid-twentieth century following the desegregation of Surry County Public Schools, and Jones's scholarly and political leanings were shaped by coming of age amid this conflict.

Jones graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1972, taught English, drama, and journalism in Hampton and Williamsburg public schools for six years, and earned her doctorate in 1984 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Two years later, she married J. Frank Papovich, a professor. Jones took a teaching position in 1984 at the University of Richmond, where she continues to teach today.

Jones began her career as an anthology editor with 1991's Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture. With her subsequent collection, Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature, she delved into the material that would inform all her subsequent work—southern places, families, and communities, seen through the writing of authors from William Faulkner to Anne Moody. In Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White, Jones compiled fiction by black and white writers as an exploration of race relations since the civil rights era. She made an effort to seek out less-published authors in addition to well-known writers like Toni Morrison and Reynolds Price. The anthology was well received by critics, who called it a useful tool both for general readers and in the classroom.

With Sharon Monteith, Jones next co-edited South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, a collection of seventeen essays that examine southern regionalism and connect it to a global culture. One of these is written by Jones herself; "I'll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians" dissects southerners' connection to the land, revealing an organic conduit of nostalgia.

In 2004, Jones published a collection of original essays, Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties. The book provides Jones's critical perspective on the same period of southern literature she anthologized in Crossing the Color Line. She uses the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi to explore the premature loss of innocence among black children of the 1950s and 1960s, and the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams to analyze the transformation of gender roles as a result of racial schisms. Jones also uses the storytelling of William Faulkner, Larry Brown, and Madison Smartt Bell to portray the way that relationships between black and white boys atrophied as the children grew up within a system that frowned upon such friendships. Race Mixing concludes with a look at race relations in twenty-first-century America, and Jones recognizes the possibility of honest and equal relationships between blacks and whites.

Jones has been recognized several times for her teaching. In 1992 she received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. She was awarded the University of Richmond Distinguished Educator Award in 1989 and again in 1992.

Major Works

• Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture (1991)
• Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature (1991)
• Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White (2000)
• South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (with Sharon Monteith, 2002)
• Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties (2004)

Time Line

• May 26, 1950 - Suzanne Whitmore Jones is born.
• 1972 - Suzanne Whitmore Jones graduates from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.
• 1984 - Suzanne Whitmore Jones earns her doctorate from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.