ForeverMissed
Large image
His Life

Later Years

May 4, 2014

In 2005, Alvin and his wife Bernadine moved to Lawrenceville, New Jersey to be near their daugther Deborah's family and to help raise their Grandson Greyson Kai Aubert Thomas. 

An Accomplished Career

May 4, 2014

Aubert left Southern University in 1970 to teach African-American literature at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Geographical distance helped him gain perspective on his life in the South; consequently, his first poetry collection, Against the Blues (1972), focuses on his Louisiana childhood. His next book, Feeling Through (1975), includes technically experimental poems on such themes as adolescence and army life. Because he wrote personal poetry at a time when many African-American poets were exploring political and social topics, Aubert was criticized for being detached and allusive. Yet he maintained that African-American experience was broad enough to encompass varied voices and points of view. He received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973, and a second one in 1981.

In 1975 Aubert founded the journal Obsidian: Black Literature in Review "to provide a place to publish for young writers who had difficulty in getting their works published elsewhere," he explained, "and to create a forum for the critical discussion of works by African and African-American writers generally." Aubert served as editor until Obsidian ceased publication in 1982. (It was revived in 1986 as Obsidian II at North Carolina State University.)

Aubert joined the faculty of Wayne State University in Detroit in 1979. From 1988 through 1990 he was interim director of the university's Center for Black Studies, and in 1990 he was interim chair of the department of Black Studies. During this period he produced South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems (1985) and his first play, Home from Harlem (1986), which was based on the novelThe Sport of Gods, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Subsequent plays and short fiction by Aubert have appeared in journals and anthologies.

Alvin Aubert retired from teaching in 1993 but continued to write. If Winter Come: Collected Poems, 1967–1992 appeared in 1994; it was followed by Harlem Wrestler and Other Poems (1995). About the latter collection, Marilyn Nelson wrote, "We meet the same wistful, playful man, in this book grown older, wiser, perhaps a bit sadder.… Aubert begins with poems of self-declaration, moves through a wide range of interests and curiosities, and concludes with a cluster of poems which face age."

From: African-American Writers, Revised Edition, A to Z of African Americans.

 

Early Career and Family

May 4, 2014

While in the army, Aubert married for the first time and fathered a daughter, Stephenie. He was discharged from the army in 1954, having completed two tours of duty in Korea and having attained the rank of master sergeant. His marriage ended in divorce, and he went to work on the night shift at the Veron Provision Company, a meatpacking firm in Gramercy, Louisiana. By day he made plans to attend college on the G.I. Bill.

Aubert applied first to Louisiana College in Pineville but was rejected because of his race. He next applied to Xavier University in New Orleans, but the admissions committee considered him inadequately prepared. His third choice, Southern University in Baton Rouge, a traditionally black school, accepted him, and he began classes there in 1955. He received guidance and encouragement from the chair of the English Department, Professor Blyden Jackson, a man Aubert called the "dean of Negro literary critics." He won a liberal arts scholarship for his final two years of study, and he graduated in 1959 with a bachelor's degree in English language and literature.

While an undergraduate, Aubert acted with the Riverbend Players, a group affiliated with the English department. Through the players he met his second wife, Bernadine, a teacher and librarian, whom he married in October 1960. Together they would have two daughters, Deborah and Miriam.

Jackson encouraged Aubert to pursue graduate study and choose an academic career, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled him to earn, in 1960, a master's degree in English language and literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He then returned to Southern University as an instructor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1962 and associate professor in 1965. During two sabbaticals he completed additional graduate study at the University of Illinois, with emphasis on Shakespeare and Milton.

Meanwhile, throughout the United States the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had awakened interest in African-American culture and created a demand for college courses in African-American studies. In 1967, therefore, Aubert developed and taught a course in African-American literature at Southern University. He prepared by immersing himself in the study of black writers and their work, from the Harlem Renaissance through the 1960s. "In studying African American literature I was also sensitizing myself to the values of African American culture in general," Aubert wrote.

Also in 1967, Aubert first published a poem. "Nat Turner in the Clearing" appeared in Motive, Xavier University's literary magazine. This poem and another, "Bessie Smith's Funeral," were later selected for an anthology, Southern Writing in the Sixties. In 1968 Aubert was the Bread Loaf scholar in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont.

 From: African-American Writers, Revised Edition, A to Z of African Americans.

Adolescence, the Army and Further Education

May 4, 2014

Aubert then became a clerk and delivery boy at Achille's Cash Store in Lutcher for $10 a week. He read newspapers to keep up with the events of World War II and scanned the pages for mention of the Tuskegee Airmen, the African-American army pilots who trained in Alabama and flew missions over North Africa and Europe. When he learned that the army required its pilots to have a high school education, he sent away for a book titled High School Subjects Self-Taught, but he put it aside in favor of a correspondence course from the American School in Chicago. He never completed the course, but he read extensively to be prepared if the chance to finish high school should ever come.

In 1947, with no future open to him in Lutcher, Aubert joined the army at age 17, with his parents' permission. At a base library he discovered a poetry anthology—something entirely new to him—and was enthralled. He bought an anthology of his own and began writing verses, but he called his efforts song lyrics rather than poetry. As a soldier, he took and passed the General Educational Development (GED) test, which measures proficiency in high school subjects, and he continued his education through correspondence courses offered by the U.S. Armed Forces Institute. If he failed to complete one course, he signed up for another one, and eventually he enrolled in an extension course in literature through the University of California. This course instilled in him the desire to devote his life to the study of literature.

From: African-American Writers, Revised Edition, A to Z of African Americans. 

Early Life and Education

May 4, 2014

Alvin Bernard Aubert was born on March 12, 1930, in Lutcher, Louisiana, a town on the Mississippi River just west of New Orleans. As a child he rolled down the slope of the nearby levee that held back the river's flow. Alvin's father worked in a lumber mill until the Great Depression forced it to close, and from then on he did seasonal work, harvesting rice and sugarcane, although he was a good enough carpenter to build the family's home, a four-room shotgun shack that sat behind Alvin's grandfather's house.

The youngest of seven surviving children born to Albert Aubert and Lucille Marie Rousel Aubert, Alvin attended Cypress Grove School in Lutcher and studied piano and voice with his aunt Georgine Poche, an elementary school teacher in the nearby town of Gramercy. A bright student, Alvin graduated from the seventh grade as the class valedictorian. His parents therefore sent him to New Orleans to live with his aunt Mimi and attend Albert Wicker High School, but he suffered from homesickness and returned to Lutcher after three weeks away.

He next enrolled in Fifth Ward High School, a school for African Americans that had recently opened in the town of Reserve, 24 miles from his home. A train ran between Lutcher and Reserve, but Alvin seldom had the fare. He caught occasional rides with the few local men who owned trucks if they happened to be going his way, but most mornings he set out at six thirty to walk to Reserve. Alvin put himself through this exhausting ordeal to sit in Miss Glasby's eighth-grade English class, read poems like "The Tyger" by William Blake, and write his own clumsy verses. The routine eventually proved overwhelming, however, and he dropped out before finishing the ninth grade.

From: African-American Writers, Revised Edition, A to Z of African Americans. 

Obituary

May 3, 2014

Alvin Bernard Aubert, born March 12, 1930, in Lutcher, Louisiana was the youngest of eight children born to Albert Sr. and Lucille (Roussel) Aubert. Alvin left school at fourteen and worked until joining the Army in 1947, where he progressed to the rank of master sergeant during the Korean War, and where he began reading poetry seriously. 

In 1955 he earned a GED. And then studied at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in French in 1959. He received a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, allowing for graduate study at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor and completed a master's degree in English Language and literature in 1960.  He returned to Southern University as an instructor where he remained for a decade and where he coordinated and taught one of the first courses on African American literature offered by the university. During two sabbaticals, he pursued postgraduate work at the University of Illinois, concentrating on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature.

Alvin's career continued with his teaching African American literature and creative writing at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Fredonia (1970–1979) and later at Wayne State University in Detroit (1979–1992) where he was professor and interim director of the Center for Black Studies (1988-1990) as well as interim chair of Africana Studies (1990). He founded Obsidian: Black Literature in Review in 1975, which functioned as a catalyst for aspiring writers to publish and a forum for critical discussion of works by African and African-American writers. Alvin retired in 1992 as professor emeritus of English from Wayne State.

Aubert is the author of the poetry collections Against the Blues (1972), Feeling Through (1975), A Noisesome Music (1979), South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems (1985), If Winter Come: Collected Poems 1967–1992 (1994),  Harlem Wrestler and Other Poems (1995), and The Way I Do: New Poems (2004). His poetry draws on his personal experience of growing up in a small Mississippi River town as well as his interest in African American cultural figures.

Aubert’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1981), the Callaloo Award (1988), and the Xavier Activist for the Humanities Award (2001) as acknowledgement for his donation to the Xavier University Library of his collected books and periodicals totaling more than 2,500 volumes, as well as many of his personal papers.

In recent years, Alvin participated as a guest author for the People & Stories, Crossing Borders literature program and was a member of the Delaware Valley Poets.