I study how Black literature gives language to affection, trauma, moral labor, and the worlds communities build after rupture. My teaching carries that inquiry into the writing classroom, where close reading meets public voice—and where the first draft is rarely permitted to have the last word.
01 / Research
My research centers on Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Black intellectual traditions, and the ethical life of narrative. These projects ask what literature knows about surviving domination—and what survival still demands from us afterward.
Transforming oppression through the literary worlds of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin
What if love is not outside politics, but one of the places politics happens? Radical Affections reads love, care, kinship, memory, and belonging as historically organized forms of power. It asks when attachment resists alienation—and when it becomes possessive, coercive, or destructive.
Trauma, rememory, and spiritual order in Toni Morrison
This project examines how slavery and racial violence fracture the spiritual and communal orders that sustain Black personhood. It also studies Morrison’s beginnings of repair: testimony, ancestral recovery, communal witness, and the reconstruction of a livable story of the self.
Goodness, care, and the ordinary labor that sustains Black life
Invisible Work turns toward the ethical practices that spectacle routinely misses. Through Morrison’s fiction, the project considers feeding, sheltering, warning, remembering, singing, and other quiet forms of care as intellectual and communal labor.
Current articles
Publication status is named plainly here. Academic prose already has enough plot twists.
Color as Witness: Nonverbal Trauma Language in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved
The Quiet Work of Goodness: Performative Evil in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon
Toward a Theory of Radical Affections
Writing Home: Spatial Archives of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
02 / Publications
Selected books and articles spanning composition, HBCU narrative, and the public stakes of the liberal arts.
Perfect Sound Forever · August/September 2026
Article · forthcoming
Pedagogy · accepted; forthcoming October 2026
Textbook · second edition
Kendall Hunt
Journal article · co-authored with Tamara Hill
The Journal of Popular Culture 46.1: 59–71
Textbook
Kendall Hunt
03 / Teaching
I teach literature and composition as forms of inquiry. Students learn to read closely, build an argument, revise without melodrama, and connect texts from the African Diaspora to the questions shaping their own public lives.
“Passion comes first. Then craft, care, and the courage to think harder than the first answer requires.”
Selected courses
Featured course
A course in African American literature, speculative thought, visual culture, and the strange worlds Black writers have used to question reality, identity, power, and freedom.
Downloadable syllabi
English Composition 101Fall 2026 · African American Literature, Rhetoric, Memory, and Public Voice↓Blacks in Wonderland FYEHENG 122 · Fall 2026↓African American AuthorsENG 489 · course syllabus↓Files open in Microsoft Word or a PDF reader.04 / Service learning
For nearly three decades, St. Francis Kitchen has been a place where students serve neighbors experiencing homelessness and learn what distance too often allows us to misunderstand.
St. Francis Kitchen / since 1997
I have volunteered at St. Francis Kitchen since 1997. I first brought students there as an extra-credit assignment. The idea quickly grew into a place where students from across the Atlanta University Center could serve neighbors experiencing homelessness and encounter a reality that is often misunderstood from a distance.
Today, Oprah Winfrey Scholars volunteer two Saturdays each month. The work asks them to show up consistently, listen carefully, and examine the causes and consequences of homelessness. Service becomes part of their education: an opportunity to connect reflection with responsibility and to understand people beyond the abstractions that too often define them.
05 / Digital Humanities & AI
My digital work joins literary study to emerging forms of research and teaching. The guiding question is not merely what a tool can do, but what kind of learning—and what kind of responsibility—it makes possible.
Developing AI-informed research and curriculum innovation grounded in responsible practice at historically Black colleges and universities.
Exploring how students can question generated language, document their choices, preserve authorship, and use revision as a method of critical thinking.
Building accessible course environments that combine close reading, multimedia archives, discussion, and public-facing composition.
06 / Study Abroad
Study abroad widens the archive of who Black men are allowed to imagine themselves becoming. Across South Africa and London, students read cities through migration, empire, performance, memory, and the everyday making of Black cultural space.
Field routes
07 / Media & talks
Lectures and public scholarship on Morrison, artificial intelligence, transatlantic reading, hip hop, and the future of the liberal arts.
HBCU National AI Summit · Tennessee State University
Study Abroad Lecture · London
PAMLA · San Francisco
Writing & Thinking Society
PCAS / ACAS · New Orleans
Invited virtual lecture · Universität Paderborn, Germany
08 / Curriculum vitae
More than twenty-eight years of teaching across composition, American literature, African American literature, world literature, faculty leadership, and the occasional argument about why the humanities still matter. They do.
Tenure-track Assistant Professor of English, 2022–present. Composition and Rhetoric Specialist, 2018–2022.
Ph.D. in Humanities, 2017. M.A. in African and African American Studies, 1997.
B.A. in English Literature, 1994.
Toni Morrison Society · College Language Association · National Council of Teachers of English · Omicron Delta Kappa
09 / Correspondence
For publications, invited lectures, teaching collaborations, study abroad, or scholarly exchange.