Contributing Authors

STEPHANIE ANDREA ALLEN, PhD, is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, creative writer, small press publisher, and assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media. Her current book project, “We Must Document Ourselves Now:” Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation, examines how Black lesbian literature and film reflect the material realities of Black lesbian lived experiences, as well as how they respond to and resist the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Dr. Allen is also publisher and editor-in-chief at BLF Press and coeditor of Serendipity Literary Magazine. Her creative work can be found in various online and print publications, including The Black Femme Collective, Mom Egg Review, Star*Line, Inkwell Black, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and in her two short story collections, A Failure to Communicate and How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions.JESSINA EMMERT is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. Her research focuses on “fancy girls,” a specific group of enslaved light-skinned Black women in New Orleans in the nineteenth century and is situated within the fields of Black feminism, American studies, and African American studies. Central to her research is analyzing different places in New Orleans and how these spaces created different sites of struggle for fancy girls.J. GOURDIN is a nonbinary spoken-word artist from Baltimore, Maryland. Their work frames the dissonance of being othered in intimate Black spaces and captures moments of affirming gender euphoria. J. started out as a competitive poetry recitator prior to college. They received their BS is mass communication from Frostburg State University in 2018. Since then, they have committed their self to uplifting Black students at the University of New Mexico's African American Student Services. Poetry for J. is an avenue to harness their vulnerability and bravely speak their mind. Their selected pieces follow J. as they come to terms with their struggles for acceptance in Black community and their journey to best acknowledge themselves.GRACE MCNEALY holds an MA in English literature and a BA in English with additional degrees in Spanish and interdisciplinary liberal arts, all from the University of New Mexico. Her research takes a comparative approach to twentieth- and twenty-first-century film and literature, particularly through the lens of queer theory and intersectionality. Her most recent work, “Queering the Gaze: Visualizing Desire in Lacanian Film Theory” (Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, April 2021), theorizes toward a notion of an intersectional “queer gaze” in film that challenges the conventional emphasis on queer visibility.RAYVEN MORROW is a PhD student in education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose research is focused on Black women's racialized, gendered, and classed experiences in higher education. Specializing in diversity education and K-16 educational administration, Rayven uses that experience to create radically transformative spaces for marginalized students.WATUFANI M. POE is an assistant professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD in Africana studies from Brown University in May of 2021, his MA in history and Africana studies in 2018 from Brown, and his BA in Black studies from Swarthmore College in 2013. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, he served as a Center for Humanistic Inquiry Postdoctoral Fellow at Amherst College from 2021–2022, placed in the Department of Black Studies and the Program in Latinx and Latin American Studies. His manuscript project “Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking” is an ethnohistoric analysis of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States that outlines the ways Black LGBTQ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces. The research for his book project has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, the US Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Brown University Brazil Initiative, and the Tinker Foundation.TANYA L. SHIELDS is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, an adjunct associate professor in the department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, and director of Carolina Seminars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications include the books Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (2014) and The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment (editor, 2015). She is at work on a book project on women enslavers, currently titled, “Gendering the Manager: Sex, Power and Race on Plantations Owned by Women.”JORDAN VICTORIAN (any pronouns) is a doctoral candidate in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Victorian's areas of study include Black feminist and queer theories, sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Their dissertation research examines Black nonmonogamy as a creative site of cultural and political critique/praxis, demonstrating how Black nonmonogamous theoretics, cultural production, and culture work offer powerful strategies for Black relations. Victorian has published a book review in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies of The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography by Ariane Cruz. They also coedited the zines becoming undisciplined (2019) and touching:blackstudy (2022), which include writing and art from Black graduate scholars and artists. Victorian was awarded an MMUF Dissertation Grant by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars in 2022 and co-received the Feminista Jones Black Feminist Award at the 2020 PolyDallas Millennium Symposium.BELINDA DENEEN WALLACE (she/her) is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico. Her research centers on Black queer literary and cultural studies and is rooted in intersectionality, new historicism, and cultural semiotics. She is completing her first manuscript, which queers Caribbean rebellions and resistance movements. Her writings have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, and she is the winner of the 2022 Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality (CCHS) Best Article Award.

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