Contemporary Black Fiction; Black Postmodernism; Gender/Sexuality Studies and African American Narrative; Black Feminist Theory and Criticism; Hip Hop and the Literary; Black Speculative Fiction

My research uses a critical black feminist lens to consider how a variety of African American cultural texts address evolving questions of racial subjectivity, sexual politics, and class in the United States. My first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minnesota, 2007), examined how African American writers articulate the political consequences of intimacy for the already-vulnerable black subject. In 2011, I guest edited a special issue of the journal African American Review on "Hip Hop and the Literary." My current project, "Bourgeois in the Flesh: Class, Sex, and the Vulnerable Racial Body" (under contract with the Univ of Minnesota Press), explores the dilemma of black middle-class embodiment in post-Civil Rights era African American fiction.