Ayesha Hardison

Indiana University Bloomington

Ayesha K. Hardison is the Susan D. Gubar Chair and an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is author of Writing through Jane Crow and director of the History of Black Writing (HBW).

Drew Davidson

University of Kansas

Howard Rambsy

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Howard Rambsy II, Distinguished Research Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he teaches courses on African American literature and comic books. He is the author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers.

Kenton Rambsy

Howard University

Kenton Rambsy is an Associate Professor of African American literature Howard University, where he also has an appointment in The Center for Applied Data Science and Analytics. His on-going Digital Humanities projects use datasets to illuminate the significance of recurring trends and thematic shifts as it relates black verbal artists. His 2022 book, The Geographies of African American Short Stories, illuminates an important, though often understudied, mode of literary art by interpreting writers depictions of characters navigating distinct social and physical environments.

Alisha Knight

John Hopkins University

Alisha Knight, Ph.D., is the author of Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream (University of Tennessee Press 2012) and co-editor of a scholarly edition of Hagar s Daughter (Broadview Press 2020). She is the Executive Director of Faculty Diversity at Johns Hopkins University. She previously taught African American and American literature at Washington College.

Aneeka Ayanna Henderson

Aneeka Ayanna Henderson is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture (University of North Carolina Press).

Angel Dye

Rutgers University

Angel C. Dye is a poet, scholar of African American Literature, and Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers researching rent parties in the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and she performs poetry across the United States while also working as a full-time graduate student and instructor of literature and composition.

C. Liegh McInnis

C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, essayist, Prince scholar, author of eight books, former editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and a retired English instructor from Jackson State University. He is also a former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award sponsored by North Carolina State A&T.

Cameron Leader-Picone

Kansas State University

Carmin Wong

Pennsylvania State University

Carmin Wong is a Guyanese-born poet, playwright, and dual-title PhD student in English Literature and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She studies spoken and written transnational Black literature/ poetry across the Anglophone world, and advocates for community education and The Arts by facilitating weekly poetry reading and writing workshops at the Centre County Pennsylvania jails and teaching writing workshops in K-12 classrooms as a teaching artist.

Christel Temple

University of Pittsburgh

Christel N. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in cultural memory and the intersection of History and Literature. Her most recent monograph is Black Cultural Mythology (2020), winner of the College Language Association 2021 Book Award.

Cindy Reed

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Courtney Thorsson

University of Oregon

Courtney Thorsson is an associate professor at the University of Oregon, where she teaches, studies, and writes about African American literature. She is the author of Women s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels (2013), The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (2023), and essays in publications including Callaloo, African American Review, MELUS, Gastronomica, Contemporary Literature, and Public Books.

Donavan Ramon

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Donavan L. Ramon, PhD is an assistant professor of English at SIUE. He just published his first monograph, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis & Racial Passing Narratives. If there's room for a hyperlink, please link my book that's in my signature. My faculty pic is attached.

Ebony Lumumba

Jackson State University

Ebony Lumumba is an associate professor of English at Jackson State University where she chairs the department of English, Foreign Languages, and Speech Communication and teaches courses in global and American literatures. Dr. Lumumba specializes in postcolonial literatures of the Global South and Black mothering as resistance in her research, academic publications, and teaching. Ebony views her art as activism with the specific aim of positioning Black women as integral to Black liberation.

Elizabeth Cali

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Elizabeth Cali is an Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Southern Illinois University Graduate School. She studies and teaches African American literature, Black print culture, and Black women editors.

Emily VanDette

SUNY Fredonia

Emily VanDette is a Professor of English at SUNY Fredonia.

Jennifer Colatosti

Perimeter College - Georgia State University

Jennifer Colatosti is Associate Professor and Interim Associate Department Chair of English at Perimeter College - Georgia State University. She writes and occasionally publishes fiction and creative nonfiction. Some of her work can be found in Change Seven Magazine, TINGE Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Sequestrum, and Southeast Review.

John Gruesser

John Gruesser is, most recently, the author of A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line (Oxford University Press 2022) and the editor of Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction (Texas A&M University Press 2022) and Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse (forthcoming from Texas A&M University Press in 2025.

Joseph Ramsey

Kathryn Warren

University of Texas at Arlington

Kathryn Hamilton Warren is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her essays connecting the study of literature to the personal, social, and political challenges of everyday life have appeared in scholarly journals and literary magazines including American Literary Realism, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hedgehog Review, and Vox.

Kathy Lou Schultz

University of Memphis

Laura Vrana

University of South Alabama

Laura Vrana is Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. Her research on contemporary Black poetics has appeared in outlets including MELUS, Book History, College Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, the Cambridge African American Literature in Transition series, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and her monograph Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition will be published this fall by Ohio State University Press.

Nicole Dixon

Northwestern University

Nicole Dixon is a graduate student at Northwestern University in the Screen Cultures Program. She previously studied African American literature in the graduate program in the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She enjoys exploring the crossroads of Black fiction and film.

Richard Schur

Drury University

Richard Schur is Professor of English and the Director of the Honors Program at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse.

Ross Copeland

University of Kansas

Ross Copeland is a graduate of the University of Kansas with a BS in Computer Science. During his academics, he was a researcher of the PADLOCK research group at KU. He is currently a software engineer at Dropbox.

Sarah Lendt

Indiana University Bloomington

Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt is the research project manager for the History of Black Writing (HBW).

Shanna Benjamin

Wake Forest University

Shanna G. Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Wake Forest University and author of the award-winning biography Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay (UNC Press, 2021).

Stephyn Phillips

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Terrance Wellmaker

Terrance Wellmaker is a graduate from SIUE. He loves to read and make comics, and he also does projects in the mediums of writing, filmmaking, and photography.

Vankat Karasani

University of Kansas

Venkat Karasani earned an MS in Computer Science from KU.