Arts & Humanities Futures

My areas of specialization and interest include African American literature, African Diaspora literature, late nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, literary and arts criticism, creative nonfiction, Black Atlantic studies, jazz studies, cultural studies, pragmatism, and postcolonial studies.

Currently, I’m completing a book about contemporary American literary art and popular music. I’m also building projects on John Edgar Wideman’s literary works and about ethnic American art in the age of terrorism.

My scholarship has appeared in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, College Literature, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisational Studies, and Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice.

I publish criticism frequently in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, The Crisis, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Oxford American, among other outlets.