Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Myka Tucker Abramson is a teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book project about the post-war U.S. novel, urban renewal projects, and the rise of neoliberalism.
Phyllis E. Bernard M.A., J.D. is Robert S. Kerr, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of The Center on Alternative Dispute Resolution at Oklahoma City University School of Law. Born in New York, she was raised in Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce Neighborhood and began her legal career in Washington, D.C. Noted for her work in alternative dispute resolution, Bernard’s pro bono service in Rule of Law projects in conflict zones of Nigeria, post-genocide Rwanda, and post-civil war Liberia “rewrote the book” on tribal peacemaking and commercial/civil adjudication. From 2000 to 2006 she led projects for the American Bar Association, U.S. State Department, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that are credited with preventing, reducing, and resolving tens of thousands of conflicts that would otherwise have reignited communal warfare in Africa. She has published widely on teaching, dispute resolution, and negotiation.
Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr. is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He has previously served as associate dean of the Graduate School-Newark and chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He received his doctorate and master’s degrees from New York University’s Department of English. He has published or edited: Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation; African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology (three volumes); The Pedro Gorino: The Adventures of a Negro Sea-Captain. “Fire and Romance: African American Literature since World War II” appeared in A Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Hendin. He is currently working on a critical reassessment of Ralph Ellison’s work that foregrounds the thoughts Ellison presented in his fiction, essays, and correspondence. This study refocuses Ellison’s contributions to the broad implications of American literature and culture.
Kasia Boddy teaches in the English Faculty at Cambridge University, U.K. Her books include Boxing: A Cultural History (2008) and The American Short Story Since 1950 (2010), and she has also published numerous essays on American writers, including two others on Ellison. [End Page 187]
J.J. Butts is an Assistant Professor of English at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. Prior to this, he held full-time appointments at Wartburg College and Hunter College. After studying English and Anthropology at Appalachian State University, he received master’s and doctoral degrees in English from Syracuse University. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Space Between Society and is the Review Editor of its journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–45. His work focuses on literature’s engagement with the emergent welfare state. He has published essays on representation of public housing and the critique of causal certainty in collective novels. He was awarded Honorable Mention for the Joe Weixlmann Award by African American Review for an essay focusing on documentary intertexts of the Federal Writers’ Project. Currently he is working on a book manuscript, Building in the Valley of Ashes: Literature and Development in the New Deal, which explores the discourses of planning and development in literature of the New Deal era, as well as an essay focusing on Woody Guthrie’s songs for the Bonneville Power Administration.
Keith Byerman is Professor of African American literature, Southern literature, and modern U.S. literature in the Department of English at Indiana State University. He is author of Fingering the Jagged Edge: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction and The Life and Work of John Edgar Wideman, among other titles.
Matthew Calihman is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of English at Missouri State University. He has published articles on Amiri Baraka and John A. Williams. Among his current projects is a study of African American intellectuals’ engagement with cultural pluralist thought.
John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities, emeritus, at Lewis & Clark College and serves as the literary executor...
