A Conversation with Karlos K. Hill about The Murder of Emmett Till

August 27, 2020

by Daniel Simon

A photograph of Karlos Hill juxtaposed with the cover to his book, The Murder of Emmett Till

This week marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. Karlos K. Hill’s new book, The Murder of Emmett Till, retells and recontextualizes the story for a new generation of readers born decades after this decisive moment, which helped ignite the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Hill and WLT editor in chief Daniel Simon sat down for a virtual conversation about the book.

Karlos K. Hill is an associate professor and chair of the Clara Luper Department of African & African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His next book, The Tulsa Massacre: A Photographic History, is forthcoming from the OU Press in spring 2021. Through an up-to-date narrative of events as well as one hundred photographs and carefully selected eyewitness accounts, the book will make the case that what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was not a “race riot”—it was a community lynching and attempted expulsion of Tulsa’s black community.

Civil Rights Movement

American Civil Rights Movement

Black Lives Matter

Photo by Alba Simon

The author of three books of poems, Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, translator, and WLT’s assistant director and editor in chief. His 2017 edited volume, Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award. More recently, his edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), was a Publishers Weekly starred pick. A Compass on the Navigable Sea, his anthology commemorating World Literature Today’s centennial, is forthcoming from Restless Books in February 2026. He has been named an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (2026–31).