About the Authors
La Tanya L. (Reese) Rogers, PhD serves as Interim Dean of the School of Humanities & Behavioral Social Sciences at Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville, TN. She is an Associate Professor of Literature and Drama and Associate Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Honors Program. She earned a doctorate degree in English from Howard University and two bachelor’s degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, where she won a coveted Mellon Mays Fellowship.
Committed to advancing her dual disciplines of English and Honors, Dr. Rogers is the Vice President of the National Association of African American Honors Programs (NAAAHP). For four years, she served as President of the College English Association–Mid-Atlantic Group (CEA-MAG).
Dr. Rogers is a dramatic theorist who is currently writing a digital monograph on plays hosted at Fisk University across the last 100 years that were written and/or directed by Black women. Her work focuses on identity construction, Black humanity, Womanism, culture, coming-of-age, Honors pedagogy, and internationalism. Her most recent scholarship has been featured in Interdisciplinary Humanities, the Black Theatre Review, the CEA Mid-Atlantic Review, Honors in Practice, and Pictures and Mirrors: Race and Ethnicity in Brazil and the United States.
Focused on global engagements, Dr. Rogers has led more than 100 students and faculty on study tours to France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Morocco, Egypt, Barbados, and Ghana. She has lived and researched in Madrid, Spain and São Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Rogers is currently writing a second book on Black women playwrights with support from digital publishing teams in Fisk University library’s Special Collections and Brown University Digital Publications.
Tanya E. Walker, PhD is chair and Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Department of English at Winston-Salem State University. She earned a PhD in English from Howard University, a MA in English and African American Literatures from North Carolina A&T State University, and a BA in English from Bennett College.
Dr. Walker’s research focuses on Black women writers whose works affirm Black resilience and engage in topics on gender, sexuality, and body politics. She has published and presented papers on writers such as Lucy Mae Turner, Esther Popel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Judith A. Jackson, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Aishah Rahman, and Octavia Butler. Her first book titled Margins of the Literary Imagination: A Black Speculative Reader was published in 2018. Currently, she is working on a digital project that focuses on understudied Black women writers of the New Negro Renaissance. Recent scholarship has appeared in Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Intercultural Communication for Global Engagement, and International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
Currently, Dr. Walker serves on the executive board for the Digital Humanities Collective of North Carolina. She also served on the International Black Theater Festival Colloquium Task Force and as Councilor for the Council on Undergraduate Research, Arts and Humanities Division.
