for it. This contributes to black children equating their blackness to their language making some feel inadequate because they don’t sound "black enough." As Mullen comes to understand in college there is more than one way of being black, and this came as a shock to her because she was learning about all these other black cultures from a white man. Mullen thought it strange that she could obviously see the blackness of different cultures and yet hold no true meaningful relation to it. There was not type of familiarity between her and all these other black cultures. Even in the black community where she should feel "safe" in or "belong," Mullen felt alienated. Code switching is in many ways the key to survival in these instances. For black children all over they know how to speak when they are hanging out with friends versus how they should speak to a cop if they are pulled over. Work Poetry collections Tree Tall Woman, 1981 Trimmings, 1991 S*PeRM**K*T, 1992 Muse & Drudge, 1995 Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002 Blues Baby, 2002, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse and Drudge, 2006 Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, 2013 Critical essays and books "Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig, and Beloved", The Culture of Sentiment, 1992 "Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness", Diacritics, 1994; reprinted in Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concept of 'Race''', 1997 "'A Silence Between Us Like a Language': The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek", MELUS Journal, 1996 "Incessant Elusives: the Oppositional Poetics of Erica Hunt and Will Alexander," "Holding their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States", 2000. "African Signs and Spirit Writing", Callaloo, 1996; reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, 2000, and The Black Studies Reader, 2004 "'Apple Pie with Oreo Crust': Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel", MELUS Journal, 2002 "'Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere': Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s", Meridians, 2004The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed To Be: Essays and Interviews (University of Alabama Press), 2012 Collaboration In 2011, Barbara Henning published a collection of postcard interviews with the author, titled: Looking Up Harryette Mullen'' (Belladonna). In it, Mullen writes, "Poetry, in general, is a rule-breaking activity." References External links