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Glen Waters (he/him) is a Second Year MFA poet and scholar at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His scholarly interests include African American Literature, Black Popular Culture, and African American Music. Last summer, he attended the Napa Valley Writers Conference as a John Leggit scholarship recipient and workshopped poetry with Major Jackson. Glen Poetry is published in Stephen F. Austin’s Journal of Multicultural Affairs. Currently, Glen serves as a council member of Iowa City Poetry and is the editor of Black Poetry Review.
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Delana J. Price (she/her) is a second-year English literature doctoral student at the University of Kansas. She holds a Master of Arts in English and dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Spanish and English from Marshall University. She is currently a contributing editor for the Movable Project— a grant-funded digital humanities project that collects, transcribes, and publishes personal narratives of substance use recovery in Appalachia. As a student, Delana’s scholarship explores the intersection of fan and cultural studies, as well as queer and critical race theory in popular culture narratives. Using contemporary literature, television dramas, film, and fan-produced narratives as her primary texts, she explores cultural shifts in dominant social ideologies in queer representation and self-representation in digital spaces.
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Bria E. Paige (she/her) is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She studies twentieth and twenty-first century African American and African diasporic literature, with particular research interests in black feminist theory and black geographies as well as the public and digital humanities. Additionally, Bria has held previous graduate internships with the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) based in Washington, D.C. and the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During her time at the NEH, Bria published a research report entitled "‘Tell Them We Are Rising:’ On HBCUs and the Digital (2010-2021)."
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Portia Owusu (PhD, SOAS, University of London) (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches and researches topics in African American, African, and diaspora literature. Her research interests are history/ historiography; memory; cultural philosophy, and contemporary narratives of slavery. She has published on these topics in articles and in her book, Spectres from the Past: Slavery and the Politics of "History" in West African and African-American Literature (Routledge, 2019). Her current project is on death and mourning in Africa and the diaspora.
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Kyr R. Mack (he/him) is a Master Instructor at Howard University where he teaches freshman composition and technical communications courses. He received his Master of Arts in English with concentrations in African American Literature and Rhetoric from Howard University. His research interests include the African American Vernacular tradition, Black popular culture, critical pedagogy, and composition studies. Kyr’s current research project challenges discourses of power by examining writerly texts in the Black rhetorical tradition as sites of vernacular transcription.
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Dr. Jerrica Jordan (she/her) is a professor of English at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, where she serves as co-adviser of the campus's award-winning literary magazine, Roots & Reflections. She has published articles in Feminist Modernist Literature and The Journal of American Culture and is co-editor of #MeToo and Modernism (Clemson UP, 2023). She prioritizes digital learning in the classroom and can't wait to discover more about digital humanities through the HBW Scholars Program.
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An Associate Professor of English at Hampton University, Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette (she/her) is interested in African-diasporic literature and multi-ethnic American studies. She has written and lectured extensively on topics related to cultural/cross-cultural expression and has a particular interest in the response that scholars/writers have to colonization or oppression. Noted works include Speculative Films and Moving Images by or About Black Women and Girls: Watch It!, which examines the paradoxical nature of increasingly popular but oftentimes problematic depictions of African-descended women/girls in contemporary cinema involving the supernatural, science fiction, horror, and/or superheroes. As a member of the 2023 IDH Scholars Cohort, Jeffrey-Legette will expand her Black Girls Write/Right The Future project, which entails another book project and website that examine Black female content-creators in the fields of fiction, music, and animation/comics. In this instance, unlike the former text, focal consideration is given to women as the content-creators.
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E. Gale Greenlee, Ph.D. (she/her) is an independent children’s literature and Black Girlhood Studies scholar and a teacher-scholar in residence at the bell hooks center at Berea College. She holds a doctorate in African American literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her research sits at the intersection of Black and Latinx girlhood studies, critical geography, and children’s and young adult literature. She is broadly interested in pop culture, Black Appalachian literature, memory work and Black feminist legacy keeping. She is the author of "A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks’s Homemade Love" and co-curator of the installation in the bell hooks center. At the center, she continues to amplify hooks's children's writings as an unexplored archive of feminist thought and praxis. An aspiring children’s author, she’s currently writing about Black children and green spaces and researching the history of Black crafts at Berea College.
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A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Bryon L. Garner (he/him) earned his Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University and is currently completing his PhD dissertation in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Union Institute & University. Bryon has presented and written about the intersection of Blackness, veteran identity, and patriotism. His dissertation analyzes what he calls Black veteranality and racialized moral trauma through the lens of patriotism in America. In 2023, he was selected as a HigherEd Military Fellow where he published a recent article about veterans and higher education. In 2022, he served as guest editor of the Journal of Veteran Studies for a special issue on patriotism. In 2021, Bryon was published in Confluence, the Journal of the Association of Graduate Liberal Arts Programs (AGLSP). In 2020, Bryon was the subject of a Christian Science Monitor article "On Independence Day, Black Americans see hope of a larger patriotism."
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Jalylah Burrell (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She earned her BA in English from Spelman College, her MA in Africana Studies from New York University, and her PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University. Her scholarship was previously supported by postdoctoral fellowships at DePaul University’s African and Black Diaspora Department and Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research and teaching are focused on African Diasporic literature and popular culture and enhanced by experience as a pop culture critic, digital producer, oral historian, and deejay. Praised by XXL magazine for her "insightful, intellectual dissection of hip-hop, feminism and Black culture," she has taught and written extensively about Black popular culture and is currently at work on a book-length project on Black women humorists.