Contributors
- Contributors
Houston A. Baker is University Distinguished Professor and past president of the Modern Language Association of America. Baker began his career as a scholar of British Victorian literature, but shifted to the study of Afro-American literature and culture. He has served as editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American literary studies. He has published or edited more than twenty books. His most recent books include: Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T and I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family and the South. His critique of black public intellectuals, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, won a 2009 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation.
I. Augustus Durham received his MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary. His most recent publication, “Richard Pryor: Melancholy and the Religion of Tragicomedy,” appears in the Journal of Religion and Health. His research interests include: African American male authors of the mid-twentieth century and melancholy. He is a first-year PhD candidate in English at Duke University.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and a photographer. She is the author of three collections of poetry including Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books), The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press), and Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose), which was selected for the 2012 BCALA Inaugural Poetry Prize. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart awards and she is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio, The Millay Colony, Cave Canem Foundation, and others. Griffiths’s visual and literary work has appeared widely. She was featured as an emerging poet to watch in the first ever poetry issue of O Magazine in 2011. Griffiths is completing her first film project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), a visual series of interviews about poetic craft and culture within the contemporary poetry community. Currently she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. [End Page 129]
Carol E. Henderson is chair of the Department of Black American Studies and professor of English at the University of Delaware, Newark Campus. She is the author of Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature and editor of Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture; America and the Black Body: Identity Politics in Print and Visual Culture; and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays. She has contributed essays to such collections as The Black Body Project: Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading; Confinement Literature: African American Literature from the Plantation to the Prison; Richard Wright’s Native Son: Critical Essays; Folklore and Popular Film; Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays, and James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, and has published articles in The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies; The Journal of Popular Culture; Modern Fiction Studies; Legacy; Religion and Literature; and elsewhere. She has also served as special issue editor for the journals MELUS and Middle-Atlantic Writers Association. She is currently working on a book project entitled Resurrecting the Hottentot Venus: Visions, Revisions, and Literary Responses.
David Ikard is an associate professor of African American Literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. A Ford postdoctoral Fellow and member of the Scholars Network on Black Masculinity, Ikard has lectured widely on issues ranging from black feminist studies to black popular culture. He has published two books, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama’s Post-Racial America (co-authored with Martell Teasley). He has also published essays in African American Review, MELUS, CLA, Obsidian III, and African and Black Diaspora Journal. Ikard is currently working on a book-length project, Death by a Thousand Microaggressions: The New Stakes of Blackness in the Twenty-First Century, which identifies and engages paths beyond the twenty-first-century socioeconomic obstacles that frustrate black empowerment across gender, class, sexuality, and ideological lines. Ikard is the founder of the blog Nation of Cowards (http://nationofcowards.blogspot.com). You can follow him on Twitter @blkeducator.
Asia Leeds...
