Colored Women Sittin’ On High (Melanie R. Hill)
Colored Women Sittin’ on High
Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music
by Melanie R. Hill
320 pp., 15 halftones, notes, bibl., index
ISBN 978-1-4696-8508-3 $99.00 cloth; ISBN 978-1-4696-8509-0 $29.95 paper
Publication date: April 29, 2025
For more information: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469685090/colored-women-sittin-on-high/
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From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin’ on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies.
Pushing against the patriarchal dominance that often exists in religious spaces, Hill argues that Black women’s religious practice creates a “sermonic space” that thrives inside and outside the church, allowing for a critique of sexism and anti-Black racism. She examines literature by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, music by Aretha Franklin and Ms. Lauryn Hill, and sermons by theologians Ruby Sales and Vashti M. McKenzie, and she takes readers into a sermonic artwork of artists, preachers, and freedom movement activists who are, as Hill contends, the greatest “virtuosic alchemists” of our time.
Dr. Hill will be in conversation with Trevor Weston. A violin performance will take place during the talk.
Melanie R. Hill, Ph.D. is Named Term Chair Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor of Global Racial Justice and Associate Professor of American Literature with tenure with specializations in AfricanAmerican Literature, Black Music Performance, and Womanist Literature/Thought/Theology in the Department of English at Rutgers University, Newark. Hill received her Ph.D. in English Literature with two graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hill has been a reviewer for the Yale Journal of Music and Religion and published articles on the art of the sermon in African American literature, Black feminism/womanist theology, the literary and musicological histories of Black women preachers, and on the musicological works of blues and jazz vocalists Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald under the James Baldwin Review, Religions Journal, and Oxford University Press, respectively. Dr. Hill has held positions as Associate Research Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Divinity School. Along with her positions at Yale, Dr. Hill curated a research symposium and musical concert entitled, Parting the Waters Beneath the Cross: An Evening of Sacred Music Honoring Black Women Preachers at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and Divinity School. This symposium offered a deep reflection on the sacred, sermonic and justice works of Black preaching women in literature, music, and theology with civil rights legend and theologian, Ruby Sales, Bishop Dr. Barbara M. Amos, Reverend Dr. Sharon. S. Riley, the late Reverend Dr. Cecelia Williams Bryant, and Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems.
Dr. Hill’s newly released book, Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice inLiterature and Music (UNC Press), focuses on the ways in which Black women preachers in African American literature, music, and in the space of the pulpit counter social injustices through sermon and song. Colored Women Sittin’ on High has been officially endorsed and praised by both Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, and civil rights legend and theologian, Ruby Sales. To read Alice Walker’s praise of Dr. Hill’s new book, please view here.
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling” by the Detroit Free Press. His honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Weston co-authored, with Olly Wilson, the fifth chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon (Cambridge University Press). Weston’s work Juba for Strings won the 2019 Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition. He earned his master’s and doctorate in composition from the University of California at Berkeley, and he is also a professor of music at Drew University.