About
We have a wide range of contributors to the project.
Ruba Akkad
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Ruba Akkad is currently completing her Ph.D. in English with graduate certificates in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies at TCU. She is primarily interested in Palestinian resistance studies and Third World Feminisms as well as contemporary multiethnic American literature focusing on race, gender, diaspora, anticolonialism, and resistance movements. Ruba serves as a member of the TCU student support team for the Wheatley Peters project.
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Nell Andrew is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia, where she teaches European and Latin American modern art, visual culture, early film, and dance studies. At Georgia she also co-directs the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop, a faculty research cluster sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Professor Andrew’s book, Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), tells an expanded history of the advent of pictorial abstraction as one intertwined with the simultaneous inventions of modern dance and early cinema. She continues to develop research into embodied abstraction, including the artistic mobilization of puppets, marionettes, masks and dolls from the nineteenth-century to today.
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Nell Andrew
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Tanya Baker
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Tanya Baker, Ed.D., director of national programs at the National Writing Project, is an Advisory Board member of “Learning from Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters,” a special program cluster supported by Humanities Texas, within the larger PWP project. For the past twenty years, Tanya has been committed to and shaped by the National Writing Project’s mission (The National Writing Project focuses the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of our nation's educators on sustained efforts to improve writing and learning for all learners) and vision (The NWP envisions a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world). She holds a deep commitment to practices that respect teachers and students and strives throughout her work to design learning experiences that begin with a presumption of competence and are relentlessly collaborative and deeply joyful.
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Ariane Balizet is Associate Dean for Faculty and DEI in the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, Professor of English, and Interim Chair of Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies and Women & Gender Studies at TCU. Her research interests include blood, bodies, and domesticity in the literature of the English Renaissance; intersectional approaches to Shakespeare and adaptation; and histories and theories of girlhood. She is the author of two monographs: Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies (Routledge 2020) and Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge 2014). She has articles forthcoming on Girls’ Studies and the Humanities, trauma-informed pedagogy, and teaching intersectional girlhoods in Romeo and Juliet. Her current book project, Race Games: Identity, Competition, and Play in Early Modern Literature, examines the dynamics of gameplay and colonial competition in the early modern literary Caribbean. Recent classes include Health, Illness, and (Dis)Ability in Shakespeare; Renaissance Girlhoods; Girls’ Studies; Shakespeare and Race; and Love, Sex, and Power in the English Renaissance.
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Ariane Balizet
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Zanice Bond
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Zanice Bond is an associate professor of English in the Department of Modern Languages, Communication, and Philosophy at Tuskegee University (TU), where she teaches first-year English composition, African American literature, Southern literature, and Modern English Grammar and Linguistics. She is an advocate for the arts and the humanities both in and out of the classroom. Dr. Bond earned her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Kansas where she examined the Civil Rights Movement in Brownsville, Tennessee, the site of the last recorded lynching in Tennessee.
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Willeena Booker is a third grade teacher in Horsham Pennsylvania. Willeena is affiliated with the NWP as a member of the leadership team that facilitated WriteOut 2023. Willeena presented at NCTE 2023 sharing her knowledge, experiences, and impact within her classroom of participating in NWP initiatives such as Write Out and the National Day on Writing. Willeena enjoyed the PWP Project immensely as it provided space, and depth to explore the contributions of a profound poet with deep connections in faith and form similar to Willeena's own poetry works. Willeena is excited to select a local affiliation within the NWP during the summer of 2024.
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Willeena Booker
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Tina Borah
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Tina Borah is a graduate student at the Department of English, UGA. She handles the social media and poster design for the Phillis Wheatley events. Apart from researching and reading, she teaches at the Department of English as a First Year Writing TA. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, migration literature, ecocriticism, third culture theory, and Anglophone literature from the Global South. When she is not missing her cats or reading about stock markets and AI, she likes to cook and enjoy a well-cooked meal in her free time.
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drea brown is the author of dear girl: a reckoning (Gold Line Press 2015), and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press 2021). Their writing has appeared in publications such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, About Place Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, and Zócalo Public Square. drea is currently an assistant professor in the English Department at Texas State University.
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drea brown
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Tara A. Bynum
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Tara A. Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at University of Iowa. Her book Reading Pleasures (2023) looks at four early American authors—Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, James Albert Uksawsaw Gronniosaw, and David Walker—experiences of good feeling despite the privations of enslavement or “unfreedom.” Her work has received generous support from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, American Antiquarian Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Chantel Langlinais Carlson is an Instructor of English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches modern drama and poetry, creative writing, film, and gender studies. Her one-act plays, Six Feet Apart and The Exhibit, were published by Next Stage Press, and her dramatic scene “Distance” was published in Writing Texas. In addition, her poetry has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume VIII: Texas, Writing Texas, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, TEJASCOVIDO, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Unlocking the Word: An Anthology of Found Poetry. Her poetry chapbook, Turning 25, was published by Nous-zot Press.
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Chantel Langlinais Carlson
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Vin Carretta
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Vin Carretta is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, specializing in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the John Carter Brown Library, and the University of London.
In addition to over a hundred articles and reviews on a range of eighteenth-century subjects, Vin haspublished two books on verbal and visual Anglophone political satire between 1660 and 1820, as well as authoritative editions of the works of Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and other eighteenth-century transatlantic authors of African descent. Vin’s most recent books are The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary (2010), co-edited with Ty M. Reese; an edition of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (2015); Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005; rev. ed. 2022); The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters (2019; rev. ed. 2022); and Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011; rev. ed. 2023). |
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Ashley Cataldo is curator of manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society. She is responsible for selecting, cataloging, and making accessible the Society's collection of diaries, correspondence, and other papers. She served as assistant curator of manuscripts for four years and, prior to that, held a variety of positions at AAS, including cataloger of books, reference assistant, and digital expediting assistant. Ashley holds an MA in English from Clark University and has pursued graduate work toward a PhD in history also at Clark University. Ashley has published articles on early American bookbinding, presented on seventeenth-century manuscript culture, and is interested in the intersection of information studies and the environmental humanities.
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Ashley Cataldo
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Sanjana Chowdhury
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Sanjana Chowdhury is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Texas Christian University. She has also completed a graduate certificate in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies. Sanjana is the Co-Digital Editor of the digital humanities project Teaching Transatlanticism, an online resource for teaching nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture. Her peer reviewed essay on Hinduism in colonial India has been published in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing (ed. Dr. Lesa Scholl), 2022. Her research interests include British literature of the long nineteenth century, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and British Empire history. She is currently researching foodways of the British Raj.
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Alison Clarke is a poet, fantasy author, and visual artist who is also the Amazon #1 bestselling author of Phillis: A Poetry Collection (University Of Calgary Press, 2020), and the award-winning young adult fantasy trilogy, The Sisterhood. Her historical fantasy novel about Harriet E. Wilson, the first person of colour to publish a novel, to be published by Vraeyda Literary, comes out in February 2024. Alison was the 2021 Writer In Residence of the Alexandra Writers’ Centre. She has recently won the 2020 Fil Fraser award for her contributions to literary and visual art. Alison is a graduate of Hollins University, with a Master of Arts in English Literature, focussing on Children’s Literature, and a graduate of the University of Alberta, with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, with a double Minor in French and English Literature.
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Alison Clarke
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George Elliott Clarke
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The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960. A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has also taught at Duke, McGill, UBC, and Harvard. His recognitions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and International Fellow Poet of the Year, Encyclopedic Poetry School [2019] (China). His acclaimed titles include Whylah Falls (1990, translated into Chinese), Beatrice Chancy (1999, translated into Italian), Execution Poems(2001), Blues and Bliss (selected poems, 2009), I & I (2008), Illicit Sonnets (U.K., 2013), Traverse (2015), Canticles II (MMXX) (2020), and J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) (2021).
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George Contini is a professor in the University of Georgia's Theatre and Film Studies Department where he specializes in Characterization, Acting on Camera, Queer Theatre and Film, Musical Theatre , and Solo Performance. George serves as the Head of Performance and a is on faculty for the Grady MFA in Film and serves as Affiliate Faculty for Institute for Women’s Studies. George maintains a career as an actor, director, and playwright. Most recently he appeared in the final two seasons of CW’s "Legacies" as Mr. Springthorpe, the drama teacher; and in the final episodes of "Black Lightning" as the evil Smug. His original solo show "Put It In the Scrapbook" ,about early 20th century female impersonator Julian Eltinge, has toured successfully throughout the US. Professor Contini is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at UGA. He values his time with his students and hopes that after engaging with him they are able to identify art and beauty in unexpected places or they will make art where it never was. Please visit George's website www.georgecontini.com.
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George Contini
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Nicole A. Cooke
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Nicole A. Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests include human information behavior, critical cultural information studies, and diversity and social justice in librarianship. She was the 2019 Association of Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Excellence in Teaching Award recipient, and she has edited and authored several books, including Information Services to Diverse Populations and Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era.
Bio here |
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David Mark Diamond is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He teaches and writes about eighteenth-century British and Black Atlantic writing. He has published essays in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and ELH: English Literary History, and his first book, In Good Faith (under contract with the University of Virginia Press), positions literary character at the intersection of race, religion, and empire.
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David Mark Diamond
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Brigitte Fielder
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Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020). She is currently writing a second book, on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for both humanization and racialization.
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Amy Finegold has been teaching English as a Second Language, for Kindergarten through Adult, for 26 years with the New York City Department of Education. She has enjoyed writing with the National Writer’s Project. It has been an honor to participate in the Phillis Wheatley Project, creating lessons and art from Phillis Wheatley’s poetry.
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Amy Finegold
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Kelly Franklin
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Kelly Franklin is a doctoral student in the Literature department at TCU. She began her teaching career in Los Angeles Unified School District after graduating from UCLA with a degree in American Literature. Her high school English teaching eventually expanded into other school districts including Inglewood, San Diego, and El Paso. Kelly later earned a master’s degree in English Literature from Boise State University, where she focused on ways the Gothic mode became a vehicle for oppressed groups to story tell, including the enslaved and formerly enslaved. Her current work at TCU is focused on Black Feminism and Black Girlhood Studies.
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Dr. Anne Frey is Associate Professor of English at TCU where she teaches courses in British and Transatlantic Romantic literature and law and literature. She is the author of British State Romanticism (Stanford 2010) and articles on law, history, and literary form in Romantic-era literature.
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Anne Frey
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Theresa Gaul
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Theresa Strouth Gaul is professor of English and director of the Core Curriculum at Texas Christian University. A past co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, she has published four books, including the award-winning Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823, and numerous articles on nineteenth-century US women writers, Native and Indigenous studies, print culture and archival methods, and epistolary writings.
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Kurk Gayle, Ph.D., works with language arts students in high school (Paschal HS, Fort Worth ISD) and in graduate school (MLA, Texas Christian University).
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Kurk Gayle
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Keith Hughes
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Keith Hughes holds a BA (Joint Hons) in English & American Literature from the University of Manchester, and both a MSc and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Following completion of his PhD, he did postdoctoral research at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Studies, where he developed an abiding interest in African American literature. This is now the core of both Dr Hughes’s teaching and research interests; he had devised and run undergraduate and postgraduate courses in The Black Atlantic, 20th-C Black American Fiction, African American Modernism, and Contemporary African American Fiction.
Dr Hughes has taught at numerous institutions, including Napier University and the Workers Educational Association, and holds a Diploma for Teaching in Higher Education from Birkbeck College, London (2001). |
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Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at TCU, specializes in nineteenth-century British, transatlantic, and print culture studies. Her transatlantic teaching extends to women poets and modern Arthurian literature as well as a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century transatlanticism co-taught with Sarah R. Robbins. In addition to co-editing Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures 1776-1920: An Anthology (2022) with Sarah R. Robbins and Andrew Taylor, she is author of Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (Cambridge UP, 2022).
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Linda K. Hughes
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Sujata Iyengar
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Sujata Iyengar is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where she teaches early modern critical race studies, Shakespearean adaptation, and book history. Her first book was the germinal Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England (Penn, 2005); her most recent is the innovative Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is currently completing a monograph on Shakespeare and Book Arts and editing Much Ado About Nothing for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series).
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Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator from Assam. He is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories, the novel The House With a Thousand Stories and There is No Good Time for Bad News, a poetry collection. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he has also translated two novels from Assamese to English : The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami; and My Poems Are Not For Your Ad-Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.
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Aruni Kashyap
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Shazia Khan
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Shazia Khan is an English professor at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington, California. Her research interests are in women's autonomy in American literature including works by Zora Neale Hurston and Kate Chopin. Shazia's work with the National Writing Project's studio community on Phillis Wheatley Peters has further enriched her research interests and added to the curriculum of her upcoming women's literature course.
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Nate King is the Digital Content Associate for the American Writers Museum in Chicago. He graduated from Ithaca College in 2014 with a B.A. in Journalism and a penchant for American literature. For three years he waited tables while developing a healthy writing habit, during which time he became a regular blogger for the AWM blog. His writing has also appeared in The Littleton Courier and The Ithacan, as well as the online magazine Ithaca Week. Originally from the mountains of New Hampshire, Nate moved to Chicago in 2015.
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Nate King
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Amanda Kondek
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Amanda Kondek is the programs coordinator at the American Antiquarian Society. She manages the logistics of public programming, group tours, and workshops. She has been at AAS since 2017, previously as the digitization coordinator, managing the workflow of AAS collection material scanned by digital partners. Amanda holds a BA in history from the College of the Holy Cross.
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Carmen Kynard is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Her award-wining research, teaching, and scholarship interrogate anti-racism, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/Black cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies. She traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 1.8 million hits since its 2012 inception.
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Carmen Kynard
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Casie LeGette
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Casie LeGette is an Associate Professor at the University of Georgia. Her first book was Remaking Romanticism: the Radical Politics of the Excerpt, and she is currently at work on a second book project, on poetry, education, and empire. A related article, on the West Indian Readers, is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry.
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Dr. Endia J. Lindo is an Associate Professor of Special Education in the College of Education at Texas Christian University (TCU) and core faculty in the Alice Neeley Special Education Research and Service (ANSERS) Institute. Her research focuses on improving the reading outcomes of struggling readers and students with learning disabilities. Of particular interest are approaches to teaching reading comprehension, examining approaches for implementing and enhancing school and community-based interventions, and increasing the teaching and cultural competence of educators and other professionals serving our students.
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Endia Lindo
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Claire Litchfield
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Claire Litchfield is a first year MA student in English Literature at Texas Christian University. She is interested in Early Modern British literature and has worked on a few projects dealing with transatlantic issues. In addition, her studies are often focused on gender and liminality. Claire serves as a member of the TCU student support team for the Wheatley Peters project.
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Brandon J. Manning is an Associate Professor of Black Literature and Culture in the Department of English and affiliate faculty member in the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department and Women and Gender Studies Department at Texas Christian University. His monograph, Played Out: The Race Man in 21stCentury Satire (Rutgers University press), is an examination of contemporary Black satire and how Black men use the form to produce vulnerability and decenter the trope of the Race man. He has published several essays in journals and edited collections and coedited a special issue of The Black Scholar on Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability.
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Brandon Manning
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Stacie McCormick
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Dr. Stacie McCormick, is a Mississippi-raised Black feminist scholar and writer. She is an Associate Professor of English, Incoming Chair of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Core Faculty Member of Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University (TCU). Currently, she is developing a manuscript entitled We are Pregnant with Freedom: Meditations on Storytelling and Reproductive justice focusing on Black critical engagement with gynecological and obstetric medicine. In 2021-2022 she was a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow where she created the Public Humanities Lab – a research hub for emerging public humanities scholarship at TCU.
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Ronald L. Pitcock serves as Dean of the John V. Roach Honors College. He is the Wassenich Family Chair and also a University Professor. He has worked at TCU since 2001 and, prior to serving as Dean, was the Honors Assistant Dean, Director of Prestigious Scholarships, and the J. Vaughn & Evelyne H. Wilson Honors Fellow. A specialist in experiential learning whose motto is All In; 24-7, Dr. Pitcock has taught Honors courses that took students to study cultural memory in U.S. cities—such as Honolulu, New York City and Oklahoma City—and in international settings—like London, Berlin, Munich, Rome and Florence. Named one of the top 300 professors in the United States by The Princeton Review, he also specializes in the teaching of giving and regularly leads a course that challenges students to award over $100,000 to nonprofits. For the National Collegiate Honors Council, he is Chair of the Student Interdisciplinary Research Panel Program and a member of the Assessment and Evaluation Committee.
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Ron Pitcock
Elizabeth Watts Pope
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Elizabeth Watts Pope is curator of books and digitized collections at the American Antiquarian Society. Her goal is to connect people to their history by providing access to printed and digitized sources, especially focusing on under-documented groups. Elizabeth promotes, makes accessible, and builds upon the strengths of the Society’s unparalleled collection of early American books and pamphlets. She works closely with digitization partners to make AAS collection material as widely available as possible. Her previous position at the Society was as the head of readers' services; prior to that she worked in acquisitions at AAS and in the archives at the Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut. She has an MA in history from the University of Connecticut.
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Jeffrey Richmond-Moll is curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art and graduate faculty at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Delaware, he has published essays on American still-life painting, neoclassical sculpture, modernism in the Southwest, and wartime material culture. He is editor and lead author of Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism (2021), which won the SECAC Award for Curatorial Excellence, and Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund (2022).
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Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
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Margaret A. Robbins
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Margaret A. Robbins has a PhD in Language and Literacy Education from The University of Georgia. She is a Teacher-Scholar at The Mount Vernon School in Atlanta, Georgia. She has peer-reviewed journal articles published in The ALAN Review, SIGNAL Journal, Gifted Child Today, Social Studies Research and Practice, and The Qualitative Report. Her research interests include comics, Young Adult literature, fandom, critical pedagogy, and writing instruction.
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Wendy Raphael Roberts is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY and author of Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize. Her research on early American poetry has been supported by grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. She is currently at work on a book exploring Phillis Wheatley Peters’s manuscript presence, which was recently awarded an NEH Fellowship and has been supported by grants from The Beinecke Library and The Library Company of Philadelphia.
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Wendy Roberts
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Susan Rosenbaum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, modernism, and poetry/poetics, and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop. She is the author of Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (UVA 2007), and with Linda Kinnahan and Suzanne Churchill, co-author of the website and digital scholarly book Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (2019), supported by a 2017-19 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. She is currently working on a book about Elizabeth Bishop (provisionally titled Experimental Bishop) and she has recently completed a monograph titled Imaginary Museums: Surrealism, American Poetry, and the Visual Arts, 1920-1970 (under review). Her essays have appeared in Dada/Surrealism, Genre, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in Romanticism.
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Susan Rosenbaum
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Britt Rusert
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Britt Rusert is Associate Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Rusert is currently completing a book about William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery (1859), an experimental text from the late antebellum period that imagines the first museum of Black art in the United States. Her essay on the politics of power in Wheatley's poems appeared in the 2022 special issue of EAL, "Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley's Futures." In 2023–24, she will be a fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
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Jessica Schreyer is a Professor of English at the University of Dubuque where she primarily teaches composition and rhetoric, along with an occasional literature class. She enjoys participating in the online NWP studio community to grow her knowledge and pedagogy. Her recent scholarly interests include writing and mindfulness, and rhetorical listening for the writing classroom. She is also eager to continue creating and expanding her collection of visually appealing course materials to further engage learners.
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Jessica Schreyer
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January Shannon
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January Shannon is an Advisory Board member of “Learning from Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters,” a special program cluster supported by Humanities Texas, within the larger PWP project. She teaches U.S. History and American Literature at R.L. Paschal High School in Fort Worth, Texas, where she has taught since 2003. For the past two years, she has been creating and teaching a humanities course called American Culture & Thought, which is an interdisciplinary course that counts for students’ junior year English and history requirements. January’s goal for her classroom is to teach her students the simultaneous impact of the arts and self-expression on culture, and therefore on history itself by not only weaving literature into the context of the U.S. history, but also by collaborating with visual and performing arts departments on Paschal's campus to create enrichment to the course as well.
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Liana M. Silva leads the International Baccalaureate Diploma and Career-Related Programmes at Chavez High School in Houston, Texas. She has taught advanced English classes at her high school for 6 years and counting: AP Language, AP Literature, Dual Credit College Composition I and II, and IB Language and Literature. She has a Ph.D. in English Language, Literature, and Rhetoric from SUNY Binghamton, and her dissertation is titled Acts of Home-making: Home and New York in African-American and Puerto Rican Cultural Productions. For the past 10 years, she has also been part of the founding Editorial Collective of Sounding Out! A Blog About Sound Studies, where she is Managing Editor. In addition to her work as educator and editor, she is a creative nonfiction writer. Her work has been published in the Houston Chronicle, among other places. She has also served on several Modern Language Association committees, most recently as the chair of the Committee on K-16 Alliances.
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Alonzo Smith is an assistant professor of African American literature at Appalachian State University. His research interests focus primarily on narratives of masculine resistance in the works of African American and African Diasporic writers in the long 19th century. His dissertation interrogates the decolonial approaches early American and Caribbean Black male authors including Venture Smith, John Marrant, T’Oussaint Louverture, and Frederick Douglass utilized to construct their subjectivity and challenge slavery and anti-Black institutions. He also teaches courses focused on the intersections of religion and resistance, gender studies, and postcolonial literatures and has published in The Journal of Popular Culture and Early American Literature.
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Alonzo Smith
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Adeola Solanke
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Adeola Solanke is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, and founder of Spora Stories. Her plays include her acclaimed debut, Pandora’s Box, which won a Best New Play nomination in the Off-West End Theatre Awards and was shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa’s biggest literary award. It toured to 17 UK venues. Her play The Court Must Have a Queen, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces, was performed in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. A double Fulbrighter, she’s a 22/23 Fulbright Distinguished International Scholar and was a Fulbright Post-graduate Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa International Scholar and Association of American University Scholar at USC where she earned an MFA in Cinema/TV and was twice an Academy Nicholls Screenwriting Fellowship semi-finalist. In LA, she was a story analyst for Disney, New Line and Sundance. She has a BA Hons in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, winning its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016. She’s written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Art Monthly, The Voice, West Africa Magazine and others. A founding Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, she was its British Film Institute Writer in Residence and has run playwriting programmes at the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre and Arcola, and lectures in dramatic writing internationally.
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Adrienne Stallings is currently a senior undergraduate pursuing a double degree in English and Writing at Texas Christian University. She is the English Department's Gauthier Apprentice where she assists the faculty with their research endeavors.
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Adrienne Stallings
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Rhondda Thomas
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Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University where she teaches, researches, and writes about early African American literature and culture. She is also the faculty director of Call My Name, which documents and shares stories about Black people in Clemson history from the antebellum period to the present. She is editor of volume 1 of African American Literature in Transition, 1750-1800, by Cambridge University Press and has received generous support for her work from the Whiting Foundation, SC Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.
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Mona Voelkel
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Mona Voelkel is a National Board Cerified Reading Specialist, working in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Westchester County, NY. The National Writing Project has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on her teaching and writing since her first Summer Seminar in 1986 at Lehman College with Joanne Falinski and Alan Devenish. She is the author of Stanley and the Wild Words and her poetry has appeared in The Dirigible Balloon. It has been a joy to participate in the Phillis Wheatley Peters Project; her only regret is that she didn't possess a more robust understanding of this iconic woman earlier as it would have completely changed her teaching of the American Revolution and poetry.
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Linda Wassenich
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Linda Pilcher Wassenich is an Advisory Board member of “Learning Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters,” a special program cluster supported by Humanities Texas within the larger PWP project. She received her BA with University and Departmental Honors from Texas Christian University and her Master of Social Work from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her main field of interest in in public policy which she pursued through her employment with the Visiting Nurse Association of Texas and in her volunteer work with the League of Women Voters for which she served on the Board of Directors at the local level (Dallas), state level (Texas), and national level. Linda’s public policy interests center around systemic racism, immigration, voting rights, health care, and public education. She has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement in Social Work by the Dallas Branch of NASW, the Outstanding Fundraising Executive by the Dallas Chapter of AFP, and the Field Instructor of the Year by the UTA School of Social Work. TCU awarded her the Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2019. She is the editor of Preaching and Teaching: the Complete Writings of Paul G.Wassenich, published in 2022.
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Sonja Watson
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Dr. Sonja S. Watson is Dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Spanish at Texas Christian University. Watson has an extensive background in academic administration, scholarly research and the liberal arts. Her areas of research include Afro-Panamanian Literature, Hispanic Caribbean Literature and reggae en español. In 2017, Watson received the National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award for Hispanic
Serving Institutions for her research on “Globalization, Transculturation, and Hybrid Identity in Panamanian Music: reggae en español.” Additionally, Watson has published articles in several peer-reviewed journals and is co-editor of the journal PALARA. Her book, The Politics of Race in Panama: Afro-Hispanic and West Indian Literary Discourses of Contention (University Press of Florida 2014, 2017), deals with the forging of Afro-Panamanian identity. She is also author of the co-edited volume, Transatlantic, Transcultural, and Transnational Dialogues on Identity, Culture, and Migration, which analyzes the diasporic experiences of migratory and postcolonial subjects. As dean of AddRan College, Watson works with faculty to effectively promote the teacher-scholar model; advance diversity, equity and inclusion; and strengthen AddRan’s academic reputation as a nationally-recognized liberal arts college for innovative learning and critical inquiry. |
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Lenora Warren is an Assistant Professor of Early American and Early African American Literature with a focus on literatures of abolition, insurrection, and the politics of resistance in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her book Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, And Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1798-1886 was published with Bucknell University Press in 2019. Her work has also appeared in Atlantic Studies, XVIII, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, Literary Imagination, and Readex Report. She is currently working on a book on the legacy of Phillis Wheatley in works of Black women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the relationship between artmaking, joy, and resistance.
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Lenora Warren
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Molly Weinburgh
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Molly Weinburgh is the Andrew Chair of Mathematics & Science Education and Director of the Andrews Institute of Mathematics & Science Education at Texas Christian University. Her honors include the Chancellor’s Distinguished Achievement as a Creative Teachers and Scholar, Piper Professorship, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 2020 Award for Liftetime Outstanding Service to ASTE. Her scholarship focuses on academic language acquisition and conceptual understanding in science by emerging multilingual students.
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Dr. Seretha D. Williams is the Chair of English and World Languages at Augusta University and Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies. Her research includes African Diaspora and women's literatures and digital humanities. She is a content expert on Margaret Walker, the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. Dr. Williams is the editor of Third Stone Journal, a digital publication focused on Afrofuturism. She is currently completing a book project on Margaret Walker’s unpublished manuscript “Goose Island.”
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Dr. Seretha D. Williams
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Wendy Williams
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Wendy Williams is an associate professor of professional practice in the Honors College at TCU. She received her PhD in English from TCU and her MA in English from Baylor. She teaches courses on literature, gender, empathy, and mindfulness, and her research interests include poetry and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her book George Eliot, Poetess explores Eliot’s reliance on a poetess tradition that was deeply invested in religion andfeminine sympathy.
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Dr. Nan Wolverton is Vice President for Academic and Public Programs at American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. In that role, she directs the fellowship program which offers nearly fifty fellowships annually. She has also been a material culture and humanities consultant for numerous institutions, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. She has lectured and published widely on material and visual culture topics, most recently in The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (2022).
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Nan Wolverton
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JoAnn Wood
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JoAnn Wood has been a teacher, elementary social studies supervisor, literacy/social studies consultant, and Social Studies Program Specialist at the Georgia Department of Education. In all of her roles she is passionate about infusing quality children's literature into our teaching and learning of history, and she is particularly focused on sharing formerly untold or marginalized stories so that all students can see themselves in history and the world.
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Colleen Wyrick is currently a sophomore double major in English and Communication studies at TCU. She is Editor-in-Chief for the Her Campus chapter there and works for the Office of Admissions as both a tour guide and a social media marketing intern. She serves as a member of the TCU student support team for the Wheatley Peters project.
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Colleen Wyrick
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Zandra Zagarell
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Sandra A. Zagarell, Donald R. Longman Professor of English emerita at Oberlin College, writes about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. She is past president of the Society for the study of American Women Writers. Committed to public humanities, she leads poetry discussions for people in addiction recovery and book discussions at a local public library. She is honored to be part of the Phillis Wheatley Peters project.
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Lucinda Zamora-Wiley is a high school English teacher who has taught in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas for twenty-four years. Currently, Lucinda teaches Dual Enrollment English and AP Literature & Composition at Harlingen High School in Harlingen CISD. She has been an NBCT since 2009, having recently completed her maintenance of certification in 2019. Lucinda is the founder of The Chachalocas Book Club in Brownsville, Texas, and she is a poet working to complete her first book of poetry by 2025. A former fellow of the Sabal Palms Writing Project (NWP) of Brownsville, Texas, she is also a former student of the maestros of poetry, Billy Collins and Sharon Olds…and a current student of Life.
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Lucinda Zamora-Wiley
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