CONTRIBUTORS

528 CLA JOURNAL CONTRIBUTORS Simon Abramowitsch is an Instructor at Chabot College and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include multi-ethnic American literature and critical race theory. He is working on a project that tracks the multiethnic as a political and literary concept in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the 1990s. Kelly C. Walter Carney studies and teaches world literature, environmental literature, women writers, and American ethnic literature at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she also serves as Chair of the English department. Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of African American and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Co-director of the Racialized Body research cluster at UIC. From 2007 to 2010, he served as Associate Editor of the American Studies Association’s flagship journal American Quarterly. He is Coeditor , with Grace Hong, of the University of Minnesota Press book series Difference Incorporated and the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011). He is the author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Na’Imah Ford is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Florida A &M University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri-Colombia, where she studied Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Recent publications include “A Voodoo Queen and A Blood Fiend: An Exploration of Memory and Rememory in Jewell Parker Rhodes’Yellow Moon”in Race in The Vampire Narrative (2015). Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She is co-author with David Leonard, of African Americans in Television: Race-ing for Ratings, (Prager, 2013) and Editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Teachers talk about Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She has published essays on various topics in pop culture and literature, with forthcoming essays on the queer noir of Chester Himes and the speculative trend in black popular culture. She is completing her book Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness. Michael Hill is the lead Guest Editor for this special issue on Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and Chair of the African American Studies Program. His research focuses on post-Harlem Renaissance African-American literature. Looking at debates about cultural merit, he explores how black creative styles reveal the challenges of creating a multiracial democracy. He is the author of The Ethics of Swagger: Prizewinning African American Novels, 1977-1993 and—along with his wife Lena Hill—co-edited Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era (2016). He co-wrote Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: A Reference Guide (2008) and was a contributor to After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing CLA JOURNAL 529 in the University (2016), The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011), and Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2011). His current works in progress include Weathervanes of Democracy: Adolescence in African American Novels, 1937-2016. Aja Storm Kennedy is a PhD student in the Department of English at Howard University. Her research centers on contemporary African American literature, specifically Black women’s self-representation in fiction. Kiese Laymon is currently Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.  Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications, including Esquire, McSweeneys, New York Times, ESPN the Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, PEN Journal, Fader, Oxford American, The Best American Series, Ebony and Guernica. He is a contributing editor of Oxford American. Emily J. Lordi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of two books: Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and AfricanAmerican Literature (Rutgers UP,2013) and Donny...