Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

English
The University of Texas at Austin
2006

Master of Arts (M.A.)

African and African American Studies
Clark Atlanta University
1998

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Psychology
Howard University
1993

Undergraduate Courses

African American Literature from 1940

African American Literary Foundations

African American Realism, Naturalism, Modernism

African American Literature from the Black Arts Movement to the Present

Featured Author: Colson Whitehead

Featured Author: N.K. Jemison

Introduction to Black LGBTQ+ Studies

Topics in Literature and Writing: Black Women’s Literature and the Politics of Adaptation

Graduate Courses

African American Literature I

Independent Study: Ekphrasis and Black Writing

Inaugural Honors Faculty Fellow (COAS), Howard University; 2023

National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship; 2019-2020

An Elegy of Place

"An Elegy of Place": Affective Mapping in June Jordan’s Civil Wars

Most people know June Jordan the poet, the activist, the political essayist, and perhaps even the fiction writer. Fewer perhaps know her as an architect, urban planner, Black ecofeminist, and spatial theorist. This essay uses Jordan’s theories of place as a framework for her autobiographical writing, turning primarily to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a compilation of essays, letters, lectures, scenarios, diary entries, and reportage. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates Black feminist autobiography scholarship, trauma and affect theory, and queer theory uncovers Civil Wars as both an autobiography of feeling and an archive of intellectual development. Jordan’s theory of place in Civil Warsfunctions as an architectural aesthetic that facilitates affective mapping—the movement of feeling between the self and the collective. Affective mapping allows Jordan to narrate a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.

Black Women’s 1930s Protest Fiction

Chapter 3: Black Women’s 1930s Protest Fiction in African American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940

The 1930s and the onset of the Great Depression mark a generic and geographic detour that illuminates Black women writers’ radical aims. Their short stories extend and revise aesthetics associated with New Negro women’s writing, like domesticity and racial passing. Black women’s protest short fiction also disrupts the masculinist character of proletarianism by demonstrating how gender and sexuality complicate notions of work, radical politics, and desire. These writers supplant urban crisis narratives with an emphasis on everyday struggles – to find work, to secure decent housing, to raise children, often alone, and to deal with racial as well as intimate partner violence. Their emphasis on intimacy attests to the roots of Black women’s protest traditions in nineteenth-century abolitionism. The intersectional approaches of 1930s writers anticipate not only the postwar fiction of writers like Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Childress but also Black feminist writing in the latter part of the twentieth century by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Louise Meriwether, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker, among others.

Gloria Naylor, Ann Petry, and Black Feminist Regard

Gloria Naylor, Ann Petry, and Black Feminist Regard

In “Black Feminist Regard—as Ethics, as Aesthetics,” critic Aliyah Abdur-Rahman draws on Toni Morrison’s notion of “self-regard” to conceptualize Black feminist regard as a "radical ethic of being and relating" that contributes to Black women's collective knowledge and imagination. This essay argues that Gloria Naylor and Ann Petry's correspondence and fiction demonstrate an ethics and aesthetics of Black feminist regard. I examine their archives for letters they exchanged, publication materials Naylor provided for the reissue of Petry’s novel The Street, and Petry’s journal entries that reference Naylor to establish the writers’ regard for one another.