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Professor of English, Georgia State University  

Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters

Academic Director, GSU-CAS Center for the Study of Africa and Its Diaspora (CSAD) https://csad.gsu.edu/

PI,Mellon Foundation Intersectional Studies Grant 2022-2025

Member, UMMC Asylum Hill Research Consortium (AHRC)

Advisory Board, Obama Institute for Transnational Studies,

        Former Treasurer, College Language Association, 2016 -2020

        Former Ex Dir, South Atl Modern Lang Assoc, 2015-2020 

 

Education: Emory University PhD English, Certificate in Women’s Studies

My work engages studies on spirituality and gender in African Diaspora Literatures of the Americas, and I am particularly interested in early works. I co-edit the Roman & Littlefield book series, Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving. I am the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction (Lexington Books 2011), coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington Books 2013). My other publications can be found in critical anthologies and in journals such as ReligionsMELUS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, and South Central Review

 

Some Highlights: 

Forthcoming USC Press, Dec 2022: Finding Francis

“Lift Every Voice: Atlanta’s Contribution to the Black Poetic Tradition.” 2021. A Library of America, AARL, Schomburg, CSAD collaboration. 

https://calendar.gsu.edu/event/lift_every_voice_atlantas_contribution_to_the_black_poetic_tradition#.X-4wZ2RKiqA

Five Points Podcast on Nikky Finney Interview. 2019. http://fivepoints.gsu.edu/nikky-finney-and-mentorship/

March 2017 article, “How World War I sparked the artistic movement that transformed black America,” in The Conversation 

Among scholars interviewed and consulted in the production of Georgia Public Broadcasting’s award winning documentary on the 75th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.

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