Faculty Profiles

I am a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In both my creative and scholarly work, I explore the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. My current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positivity, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. My research/creative work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the African American Intellectual History Society. In addition to my academic engagements, I am committed to public facing work. I have published poetry, comics, and essays in Boston Review, Zora, Glamour, Lit Hub, Washington Post’s The Lily, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. I am the founder of the Black Women in Jazz Oral History Project, a project that seeks to redefine how we think about community, labor, and artistic production in jazz.