Contributors
- Contributors
Terrance Dean is a doctoral candidate in homiletics and liturgics in the graduate department of religion at Vanderbilt University where he studies the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in homiletics and liturgics. He is more specifically interested in how black religious rhetoric abets black gay men's lives politically and socially in the US South and in South Africa. He is also interested in rhetoric and communication, slave narratives, and Afrofuturism. Terrance earned his master's in theology from Vanderbilt Divinity School in May 2014, and he is a 2005 John Seigenthaler journalism fellow (Vanderbilt). Terrance is also a published author and journalist who had a long career in the entertainment industry and the nonprofit world prior to his current graduate work.
LeConté Dill is a native of South Central Los Angeles and is currently creating a home in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn with her husband Umberto. She is a scholar, educator, and a poet. She holds degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. Currently, she is an assistant professor of public health at SUNY Downstate.
Kathleen Gyssels is professor of Francophone postcolonial literatures and cultures at Antwerp University, where she teaches classes on authors from the African and Jewish diasporas. She publishes in French, Dutch, and English on African American, Caribbean, and Francophone authors and subjects from a broad, comparative perspective. Her current research has extended her reach to include conflictual issues, such as latent black antisemitism in the French Antilles, the Memory Laws, and the Memory Wars in the French Republic and postcolonial countries.
Marcelle Haddix is a dean's associate professor and chair of the reading and language arts department in the Syracuse University School of Education. She directs two literacy programs for adolescent youth: The Writing Our Lives project, a program geared toward supporting the writing practices of urban [End Page 76] middle and high school students within and beyond school contexts, and the Dark Girls afterschool program for black middle school girls aimed at celebrating black girl literacies. She has published in Research in the Teaching of English, English Education, Linguistics and Education, and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Her monograph is entitled Cultivating Racial and Linguistic Diversity in Literacy Teacher Education: Teachers Like Me. She is the presidentelect of the Literacy Research Association.
Heidi R. Lewis is an assistant professor and associate director of feminist and gender studies at Colorado College and associate editor for The Feminist Wire. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships. She has presented at the Educating Children of Color Summit and the Berlin Campaign against Police Violence. She has contributed to NPR, Bitch, and Act Out, among other intellectual activities.
Sherell A. McArthur is an assistant professor in the department of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. Her research agenda examines media literacy of teachers and students, popular culture as an educative site, culturally responsive pedagogical approaches, and the identities of black girls.
Kevin Meehan is professor of English and director of the Haitian Studies Project at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange (University of Mississippi Press, 2009), and has published previously in Callaloo, Small Axe, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and Narrative. He is working on a translation of Négritude prose by Léon-Gontran Damas, a project begun in 2013 while he was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He also works in the field of climate change education for sustainable development. He is a 2017–2018 Fulbright scholar at Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College in St. Kitts where he is coauthoring a series of publications on hydroponic agriculture in the Caribbean and producing a series of documentary and feature videos on hydroponics and climate change adaptation.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons is an assistant professor of history and women's studies at the University of Michigan. She is also the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (UNC Press, 2015). Simmons has written about black girlhood and historical methods in...
