-
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.
-
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.
-
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)."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
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.
-
Sabrina Bramwell (she/her) is a first-year Ph.D. student at Howard University. Her literary and research focus includes Caribbean and African American works, concentrating on recorded acts of resistance in Anglocreole cultures and traditions alongside Afrofuturism. She is interested in processes like creolization and marronage alongside Afrofuturist techniques that are processes engaged in recovering the value of cultural expressions. She is cognizant of the ways in which dominant and submerged narratives have historically framed culture and identity and hopes to make a digital contribution through archival works and interactive pedagogy. Prior to enrolling at Howard University, Sabrina completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at SUNY Geneseo and proceeded to work in the Office of Admissions as a regional New York City counselor for 3 years. Currently, when she is not studying or engaged in research, Sabrina can be found journaling, watching a new sci-fi/superhero movie in theatres, or playing (competitive) games with her family.
-
Austin Anderson (he/him) is an English Ph.D. student at Howard University where he studies American literature and culture, with a particular focus on how race is represented in visual media such as comics, video games, and visual art. His dissertation project focuses on Blackness in video games and explores how this representation is reflective of global neo-liberal conceptions of race and racial ideology. He has previously published work in The Comparatist and ASAPJ, and he has presented at MLA, AAAD, CUNY, and NYU.
-
Abisola Akinsiku (she/her) is a doctoral student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the English Department, University of Kansas (KU). She focuses on Women's Literature and its digitization. Previously, she attended Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Nigeria, where she received her bachelor's with honors and served as a GTA. She completed her master's degree in English (Literature) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville with distinction. In the fall of 2019, Abisola received the Competitive Graduate Award, which allowed her to research the history of female fiction writing in Nigeria, starting with Flora Nwapa. She found that some fictional texts self-published by first, and second-generation Nigerian women writers are gradually going into extinction; they need to be recovered and digitally preserved, a project she is collaborating with the University of Kansas, History of Black Writing (HBW), to accomplish. Her scholarly interests include broadly Afro-continental and Afro-diasporic literature from the 19th century till now, digital humanities, migration, and gender studies. To learn more about Abisola, visit her website here.
-
Griselda Thomas is a Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University. She currently teaches courses in African American literature and culture, Black feminist studies, and African & African Diaspora studies. Her Black feminist class “The Black Woman.” is currently participating in the Woman Leadership Virtual Exchange Program with the University of Hassan ll in Casablanca, Morocco sponsored by a Steven’s Initiative Grant. Her research and publications explore the politics of the Black female body, spirituality in the fiction of contemporary Black women writers, cultural influences in the Black community, and online pedagogy. One of her most recent publications is “A Small Piece of Blue Fabric: The Significance of Yemonja in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata,” a chapter in Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Practice: Yemonja Awakening (Lexington Press, 2021). Her current research explores how the actions and writings of women motivated, resisted, and documented white race riots in Georgia and North Carolina.
Dr. Thomas’ teaching, scholarship, and service are guided by her commitment to diversity and equity, interdisciplinary studies, and the intersectional inquiry of systems of oppression. She is committed to the mentoring and professional development of students living and working at the margins. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department’s Outstanding Diversity Advocate Award, the College of Humanities Social Sciences Outstanding Diversity Advocate Award, the Presidential Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity R.O.H. Social Justice Award, and the Kennesaw State University Diversity Advocate Award.
-
La Tanya L. Reese Rogers, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Literature and drama and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Honors Program at Fisk University. She holds a doctorate degree in literature and drama from Howard University and two bachelor’s degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, where she won the coveted Mellon Mays Fellowship. Dr. Rogers is a co-founder of the Edward Alexander Bouchét National Graduate Honor Society, which has chapters at Yale, Stanford, and other prominent universities across the nation. She is the faculty advisor to the 2022 Battle of the Brains national championship team from Fisk University where she is a faculty member in the English Discipline.
In previous roles, La Tanya Rogers served as a Communications Coordinator for the financial firm, A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc.; a translator for the United States Embassy in Madrid, Spain; an assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia; and a performance-review board member at the US Department of State and the US Department of Commerce. She has led nearly 100 undergraduate students on study abroad tours to countries such as France, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, and Egypt. She has lived, researched, and worked in São Paulo, Brazil, and Madrid, Spain. She is a published author on subjects ranging from contemporary playwrights in the United States to economic racism in Brazil.
During 2022, Dr. Rogers participated in the NEH-sponsored Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing Institute at Brown University. During that Institute, she resolved to collaborate with the Brown University Digital Publications team to increase the prestige and popularity of digital scholarship among university faculties. As a result, her latest article on dramatic literature has appeared in the Black Theatre Review (tBTR)—a national, refereed, digital journal. Moreover, she is a featured faculty member on a grant partnership that focuses on HBCU library involvement in digital scholarship. Dr. Rogers is currently working on a manuscript that outlines a theoretical trope in the plays written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. This manuscript is a digital publication with a print compendium.
-
My intellectual interest and practice span a range of interlocking disciplines. My first degree is in Botany with interest in ecology and genetics. Thereafter, I changed from the natural sciences to social sciences and finally to language teaching. My educational background also spans three continents; namely Africa, Europe and the Americas. Learning from these three continents has given me different resources from which to draw from. My teaching of Yoruba language is also enhanced because I am a native speaker of the language and a close watcher of its diverse cultures and modes of creative expressions.
My secondary interest is in the intersection of Yoruba language in a global world with media studies. In addition, my science background and expertise in media production (Radio, TV, and Moviemaking) play a role in how I present my materials in class. I am a storyteller who has been invited to different events as a performer and as a workshop participant. In effect, my areas of specialization include: language teaching (which I started from Rutgers University in 2001), media studies and media production (which has helped in the production of audiovisual materials).
-
Sherry Johnson tells stories that engage memory and Black writing between Canada and the United States. She is a writer, researcher, and scholar of literature, particularly at the intersection of Black women's lives and their writing, African American visual culture, and the digital humanities. An associate professor and a graduate program administrator, Dr. Johnson teaches courses in African American literature, Multicultural American literature, neo-slave narratives, and critical approaches to literary study.
-
Hai In (HEH-in) Jo is a third year Ph.D student in English at Texas A&M. Her primary research interests are African American literature, 19th-20th century American literature, and digital humanities, with a focus on slavery and archive of slavery. She is at a very early stage of her dissertation that reads how African American literature offers ways of creating, collecting, presenting, and reading racial data in an ethical way by looking at the scenes of Black lives being represented as mathematical equations, objects, and data. As an international student from South Korea working on digital projects that deal with enslaved Black people in America as well as the Cherokee nation, she is constantly pondering upon her situational position.
-
Dr. Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D., M.F.A., is an assistant professor and head of the B.A. program in Theatre Arts at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL. Her scholarly research interests include a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in Black theatre and dance studies and solo autoethnographic performance. Michelle has publications in the Black Theatre Review; the Journal of American Drama and Theatre; Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies; and book chapters in Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (Routledge 2022); Hurston in Context (forthcoming Routledge 2023); and Enveloping Worlds (forthcoming 2023). As a Zora Neale Hurston scholar, Michelle is interested in tracing the relationship between Hurston’s work as an anthropologist, ethnographer, and playwright. Her current work is a digital project that cross-references Hurston’s play text, personal narratives, anthropology, and ethnographic works to examine perceptions of early twentieth-century Black women identities.
-
Felicitations! My name is Kandice Rainn Fowlkes and I hail from Decatur, Georgia. I have always aspired to be a writer and work in education since I was a child sitting at my desk, critiquing a teacher's approach to how they could creatively engage a child's mind in learning. From volunteering in local schools, to helping fracture the canon of young men and women in my community --I have always sought out various opportunities to aid people in reaching new educational goals that they did not even think could be exceeded, whether it be adolescent or adult education. I wish to one day open my own school where I incorporate Montessori teaching philosophy with altered public school pedagogy, in order to offer an alternative, yet fruitful, teaching method to low-income communities.
-
Jenny Factor is a Lecturer in Poetry/Creative Writing at Caltech and doctoral candidate in English at Brandeis University. As a 2023-2024 Publication Scholar, Jenny is exploring the possibilities of a sample DH project centered around an alternative archive of the circulated manuscript- and periodical-versions of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s poems, mapped, recorded, or otherwise re-rendered into local and familial contexts. Jenny has benefited from a number of Brandeis University’s recent humanities initiatives including a 2022-2023 Race and Literary Studies graduate fellowship and a 2022 sponsored internship with the Lady’s Museum project. Her first book of poems was a finalist for a Lambda Literary award. Jenny’s poetry and blogposts are available @ Jenny Factor – Poetry, Craft Work, Audio.
-
Dr. Charity Clay is a Critical Race Sociologist of the African Diaspora. She currently teaches in the sociology department at XULA (Xavier University of Louisiana), an HBCU in New Orleans. She is the head of the major concentration in crime and social Justice and her work centers around Pan-African liberation and resistance movements dating back to 17th century Marronage throughout the Americas and addressing current Anti Police-Terror Movements and those under the umbrella of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States and abroad. As an affiliated faculty member of the African American and Diaspora studies program at XULA, she has worked to develop study abroad opportunities for students throughout the African diaspora with centering around Afro-Indigeneity in the “Americas” and transatlantic Blackness outside of the United States.
-
Lavonda Kay Broadnax’s primary research interest is the diverse set of literature written by African American women who lived during the U.S. Civil War. Her initial compilation, of the online version of these works, was the catalyst for her to win the Zora Neale Hurston Award. This award is given by the American Library Association for leadership in promoting African-American literature. The compilation has been expanded and now resides on the Library of Congress website @ African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era: A Resource Guide. Ms. Broadnax was a successful participant of the Black Book Interactive Project's Scholars III (2022). She earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.S.L.S. from Case Western Reserve University.
-
Jada Bradley has earned a BA from Spelman College and an MA in Spanish Translation from Rutgers University. She has worked as a writer and editor in trade and educational publishing for over two decades. Jada's passions include children's literature, language acquisition, and amplifying the voices of underserved communities.
As Senior Editor of Culturally Responsive Education for Westchester Education Services, Jada helps create and edit culturally relevant educational projects that connect with students and offer opportunities for differentiation.
-
Cocoa M. Williams received her PhD in African American Literary and Cultural Studies with a minor concentration in American Modernism and Black Diasporic Modernisms at Florida State University. Her research interests include African American women’s literature, black modernity, modern African American art, black digital humanities, museum studies, black film studies, and folklore. Her dissertation project explores the impact of museum culture on African American arts and letters. She holds a B.A. in English (2005) and a B.A. in Philosophy (2005) from Valdosta State University, and she completed an M.A. in English at Clemson University in 2007. Cocoa Williams is the recipient of the J. Russell Reaver Award for Outstanding Dissertation in American Literature or Folklore, McKnight Dissertation Fellowship, P.E.O. Scholar Award, and the Ruth Yost Memorial Scholarship, among others. Dr. Williams is also a published poet. Her poetry has been published in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Ninth Letter, College Language Association Journal, and december magazine.
-
M’Balia Thomas is Assistant Professor at the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Kansas. She is an Applied Linguist and TESOL teacher educator. She writes on the everyday creativity of non-native and non-standard varieties of American English.
-
Rochelle is author of AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora's Surrealist Fiction (Routledge 2019) and The Rat People (The Fantasist 2017), and co-editor, with Jina Ortiz, of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin 2014). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in The Crab Creek Review, The Believer, TriQuarterly, Callaloo, the African American Review, Solstice, Poets and Writers, Lithub, The Jamaican Observer, The Carbon Culture Review, The East Bay Review, Eleven Eleven, Ms., Mosaic, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Hip Hop, The Millions, Graveyard Shift Sisters, Terrain, and Art Practical. Rochelle is an alum of the Clarion West Workshop taught by K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl and a National Black Writers Conference workshop taught by Victor LaValle, and her curatorial work includes the NEA-funded Let’s Play exhibition and the Digital Literature Garden. Co-founder of AWAKE Literary Management and a founding member of the AfroSurreal Writers Workshop, Rochelle is a former board member of the Hurston Wright Foundation, a former Vermont Studio Center fellow, and a current member of the National Book Critics Circle and The Clearing, the collective founded by Serena Simpson. Writers interested in representation or collaboration can connect at writecreateimagine@gmail.com.
-
Khirsten L. Scott is a community-driven educator who works across the disciplines of critical HBCU studies, rhetorical theory and writing studies, digital and Black studies, and critical pedagogy. She is currently working on her first book and related digital projects which explores Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their survival within US Higher Education. Learn more here: www.khirstenlscott.com
-
Jacinta R. Saffold is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans and a digital archivist. She researches 20th and 21st century African American literature, Hip Hop Studies, and the Digital Humanities. Currently, she is working on her first manuscript, Books & Beats: The Cultural Kinship of Street Lit and Hip Hop and the Essence Book Project, a computational collection of popular African American Literature. Saffold’s work has been published in the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. Journal, Black Perspectives, Cultural Front, and Bloomsbury’s #MeToo and Literary Studies Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture.
-
Valerie Rose Kelco is a Ph.D. student, teaching assistant, research assistant, and graduate assistant for the English department at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Her research concentration is African American literature with a focus on southern women’s writing engaging with the body and the environment. Her digital skills and interests intersect with her research and inspire her projects and pedagogy. Recent fellowship and institute opportunities with the National Endowment for the Humanities "Hurston on the Horizon" Summer Institute-2021, the National Humanities Center Graduate Student Summer Residency-2019, and the University of Pennsylvania Summer DReAM Lab-2019 (Digital Resources and Methods) provided training and experience with Arc-GIS spatial mapping technology and augmented reality applications to digitally enhance her scholarly work and pedagogy by creating digital open educational resources.
-
Crystal S. Donkor is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in African American and Multicultural Literature at SUNY New Paltz. Her research interests are nineteenth and early twentieth century Black women’s literature, African American print culture, and the Digital Humanities. Her current book project, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy: The Pursuit of Pleasure in Black Women’s Literature, 1859-1910 studies pleasure at the intersection of African American women’s literature and African American print culture. Her next project, Black Literacies, is a digital humanities project and monograph that broadens definitions of African American literacy and citizenship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
-
Marina del Sol is a Master Instructor in the English Department at Howard University. She received a Ph.D. in Folklore and Anthropology from the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California at Berkeley. As a digital humanities scholar, Dr. del Sol’s work focuses on citizenship in the public sphere. During the spring of 2021, she served as an Expert Specialist for “Ensuring Scholarly Access to Digital Records,” hosted by Virginia Tech and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Her current project, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Pre-Research Guide,” focuses on archival research, cultural documentation, and ethnographic writing.
-
Sondra Bickham Washington, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in 19th and 20th century African American literature, particularly focusing on literary treatments of black girlhood and the ways that race, gender, and trauma affect African American female children and adolescent characters. Washington also founded The Black Girlhood Project, a digital humanities resource designed to enhance the emerging interdisciplinary field of black girlhood studies and to offer scholars and researchers a centralized location for networking and information on black girls.
-
Amanda Bennett is a Black feminist educator, consultant, and poet living in Durham, North Carolina, where she is currently a PhD candidate in Literature at Duke University. Her dissertation explores the existence of Black femme magic within 20th century Black women’s literary history. She is the founder of define&empower, a Black feminist education and consulting collective. Combining her academic knowledge of Black feminism, LGBTQ studies, and cultural studies, Amanda develops accessible public educational content on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and her podcast, Black Feminist Hotline. In her consulting work, Amanda is able to draw on this database of knowledge to host workshops, lead training sessions, conduct research for brands, and provide one on one leadership coaching sessions. You can find define&empower online at defineandempower.com and on Instagram and TikTok at @defineandempower.co.
-
Ayana K. Weekley is an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI. Her research and teaching interests include feminist periodical studies and Black feminist studies. Dr. Weekley’s scholarly contributions include:
“Black Feminist Thought and the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist PhD: A Roundtable Discussion.” Feminist Formations, 32(2), 1-28; coeditor of Women’s Magazines in Print and New Media (Routledge, 2017)
“Saving Me Through Erasure? Black Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability,” in Black Female Sexualities (Routledge, 2015). Dr. Weekley participated in the 2021 NEH Summer Institute “Hurston on the Horizon.”
-
Sidra Smith earned her PhD from Tufts University, with a focus on late nineteenth and early twentieth century African American literature. Since earning her doctorate, she has taught literature, writing, and Black cultural expression at both secondary schools and institutions of higher education. She recently accepted an adjunct position at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt.
-
Katelyn Shirley is pursuing an M.A. in English Literature and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies. She earned her undergraduate degree in English from KU in 2018. Her research interests tend to combine ideas from both English and MUSE, and she dabbles in everything from Gothic literature to African American literature and even creative writing.
-
Kevin Lucas is a lecturer in the Department of English and World Literature at Augusta University. He received a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University in December of 2019. He teaches writing, world literature, and interdisciplinary humanities at AU, and his research focuses on how ideas of sacrifice and tragedy influence artistic and political debate in Europe and North America.
-
Nicole Dezrea Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and committed to teaching with such emphasis on topics such as race and ethnicity, poverty, and the Black community. As a qualitative researcher, she incorporates intersectional and critical feminist frameworks into her own research, centering the experiences of women of color. Her most current research project incorporates two years of ethnographic data collection in a Las Vegas African hair braiding salon. She discusses labor, identity making in the African diaspora, work-family balance, and the racialized politics of appearance for Black women. Her findings provide a look inside the lived experiences of women of African diaspora and insight into some of the most significant parts of their identities. Nicole D. Jenkins is currently completing her first monograph, "'CROWNed: Black Women’s Entanglement with Beauty, Work, and Family." The manuscript is an extension of her dissertation research and examines the lived experiences of women of the African Diaspora throughout various institutions in the U.S. Specifically, the institutions of beauty, work, and family. Her most current research expands on concerns of natural hair discrimination and examines its Global impact on people of the African Diaspora.
-
D. Seth Horton is a critic and creative writer who focuses mostly on the regional literature of the Borderlands and American Southwest. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in more than forty publications. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book was an anthology, Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest, which was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018. He currently teaches literature, writing, and creative writing in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program at the University of Virginia.
-
As a public scholar active in the fields of communication studies and Africology, Kevin J. Hales examines the lives of everyday African-descended people around the world. Hales studies ethnicity (“race”), diversity, inclusion, equity, social justice, conflict, and communication across cultures. Dr. Hales has earned a litany of prestigious research and teaching awards throughout his career. Hales has received research funding from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Newberry Library, University of Tennessee-Knoxville/Marco Institute and Center for Renaissance Studies, J. William Fulbright Scholar Program, Fulbright-Hayes Program, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), United States Department of State/Bureau of African Affairs, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, Ohio University/Scripps College of Communication, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, among other institutions and programs. As a firm believer in fostering research projects that include collaborations with traditional intellectuals in marginalized communities, Hales has research partnerships with local scholars working among the Efik, Efut, Qua, and Igbo (Nigeria and Cameroon); Garifuna (Honduras and Belize); and Gullah/Geechee (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida). In addition, Hales is also working with researchers in Brazil, Italy, and Sierre Leone.
Dr. Hales has given lectures as a visiting scholar and researcher at several universities abroad. These include the University of Makeni (Sierra Leone), University of Oran 2 (Algeria), and Imo State University (Nigeria).
Dr. Hales attended Ohio University (Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication Studies), North Carolina Central University (M.A. in History), and Fisk University (B.A. in History, Religion, and Philosophy).
-
Michelle Cowin Gibbs, Ph.D. M.F.A. (she/her) is an assistant professor and head of the B.A. program in Theatre Arts at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her scholarly research interests include a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in Black theatre, dance, and performance. As a Zora Neale Hurston scholar, Michelle is interested in tracing the relationship among Hurston’s work as an anthropologist, ethnographer, and playwright. Her current work is a digital project that cross-references Hurston’s play text and her other digital archives to examine Hurston's perceptions of early 20th century Black women identities. As a solo performance artist, Michelle uses her body as a site for inquiry into how Black racialization and Black female sexualization manifest into performances of affect - teetering between the spaces of tragic/comical and repulsive/alluring. Recent solo performance works include: A Thing Held in Full View, a commentary on race, gender, and women's reproductive rights in Texas and Blunt-Force Trauma: A Mother's Performance in Empathy, a feminist autoethnographic performance that explores the relationship among motherhood, cruelty, and forgiveness. Michelle received a Ph.D. in Theatre from Bowling Green State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Acting from the University of California, Irvine and a B.A. in Theatre Performance from Western Michigan University.
-
Jina DuVernay is a librarian and archivist and is very active in the field of librarianship serving on numerous committees and initiatives that advocate for the collection and stewardship of resources related to African American history and culture. DuVernay serves as a Councilor-at-Large for the American Library Association (ALA) and has served as an executive board member for the Black Caucus of ALA. She holds a Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Alabama and is pursuing a PhD at Clark Atlanta University (CAU) where she is also a consultant for the CAU Center for Africana Digital Humanities.
-
Maggie Brown-Peoples is a first-year Master’s student in Museum Studies at the University of Kansas and an intern at the Spencer Museum of Art. She is looking forward to being a part of important work from treasured people. All of her work is in honor of those before who allowed her to be where she is as a Black woman. Digitally we are connected, but we must highlight the Black voices we are disconnected from.
-
Robin Brooks, PhD is a scholar who examines cultural matters concerning Black communities in the United States and the wider African Diaspora. She is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and her current research focuses particularly on African American and English-speaking Caribbean populations with special attention to matters of inequality and social justice. Her primary research and teaching interests include contemporary cultural and literary studies as well as working-class studies, Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, higher education management, and education policy. She is the author of several publications on writers and literature of the African Diaspora, including Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), which is a book that examines how contemporary writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the U.S. and Caribbean. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at Emory University. Website: DrRobinBrooks.com.
-
Lavonda Kay Broadnax’s primary research interest is the diverse set of literature written by African American women who lived during the U.S. Civil War. Her initial compilation, of the online version of these works, was the catalyst for her to win the Zora Neale Hurston Award. This award is given by the American Library Association for leadership in promoting African-American literature. The compilation has been expanded and now resides on the Library of Congress website @ African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era: A Resource Guide. Ms. Broadnax earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.S.L.S. from Case Western Reserve University.
-
Eliseo Jacob has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a background in Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin American literary and cultural productions. He currently is a lecturer of Brazilian literature and culture in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Howard University. His recent publications contextualize literary and cultural representations of São Paulo’s urban periphery as part of a larger analysis regarding the relationship of the public sphere to marginalized communities in urban spaces. His current book project, tentatively titled Literary Counterpublics in the Americas: Race, Space and Citizenship in São Paulo and New York, is a comparative study between the Literatura Periférica movement in São Paulo and the Afro-Latino literary scene in New York. He asserts that these writers’ fictional narratives reflect larger social trends in which historically disempowered populations create epistemological spaces that open up new routes not only for creative expression, but also for political mobilization.