Editing Hambone

The first issue of Hambone was published in the spring of 1974. It was then dormant for several years before being revived, the second issue appearing in the fall of 1982. Since then it has appeared at a rate just a bit slower than an issue per year, with issue number 14 forthcoming this fall. My comments will focus on the period commencing with the revival of the magazine in 1982, as it became a significantly different journal upon resuming publication at that point. For one, I became the sole editor and publisher, whereas the spring 1974 issue was a group effort initiated by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, where I was a graduate student. The journal in fact had a different name and a different editor at its inception; I was asked to take over when that editor, midway through the year, left Stanford for a teaching job in another part of the country. I thus, for that first issue, inherited material which had been gathered and selected by others. To this material I added contributions which I solicited from writers and artists whose work I admired. I also gave the magazine the name Hambone. Shortly after the appearance of the first issue, I too left Stanford for a teaching job elsewhere. No one at Stanford took up the job of continuing to put out the journal, so for several years I carried around the idea of someday reviving it in a somewhat different form--which, as I've said, I did in 1982

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