CV

Full CV available upon request

EDUCATION
Ph.D. 2000 Cornell University, Department of English
M.A. 1998 Cornell University, 1998, English
B.A. 1995 University of California, Los Angeles, 1995
English and American Studies.

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

Pomona College, Professor and Chair of English, 2021 to the Present

Director of Graduation Studies, UW-Madison  (Fall 2016-Spring 2019, Fall 2020-Spring 2021)

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor of English, 2011 to 2021.

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Associate Professor of English 2007-2011

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Assistant Professor of English 2001-2007

SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS & HONORS

Fellow, Pomona College Humanities Studio 2023-4

Solas Award for Best Travel Writing of the Year 2023

E. Wilson Lyon Professor of Humanities, Pomona College, 2022-present

Kellett Mid-Career Award UW-Madison 2020 ($75,000)

Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Endowed Chair, 2014-2019, 2019-2024.

Outstanding Woman of Color Award UW-Madison, 2019

Pamela Bates Porch Outstanding Educator award from Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority 2019

Ragdale Foundation Fellowship 2016

Faculty Development Grant 2016-2017

Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Endowed Chair, 2014-2019

External Faculty Fellowship, Stanford University Research Institute of the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) 2011-2012

Pushcart Prize Nomination 2011 (3 poems from Mistress, Reclining)

Institute for Research in the Humanities REI-Fellowship. Spring 2010.

Winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2009.
Final Judge: Carol Hamilton ($1000 prize and publication)
Fellow, Soul Mountain Writers Retreat 2009.
Institute for Research in the Humanities REI-Fellowship. Spring 2009.
Feminist Scholar Fellowship, UW-Madison Women’s Studies Research Center Fall 2008
Vilas Associate Award, 2007-2009.
Faculty Research Award, UW-Institute for Race and Ethnicity Spring 2006.
Wisconsin Arts Board Grant in Poetry ($8000 Award)
Foerster Prize in American Literature 2004-Awarded to the best essay published in American Literature by the MLA.
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award. 2003
Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellowship 2000-2001

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS:

The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature. Edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2024

Grimoire. Poetry Collection. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2020.

Vixen. Poetry Collection. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2017.

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. (484pp)

Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Comedy: American Style. Jessie Fauset. Edited and introduction, annotations, appendix by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

Mistress, Reclining. New Women’s Voices Series. 40 pp poetry chapbook. Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2010.

ESSAYS AND BOOK CHAPTERS:

“Laura Wheeler Waring: A Luminous Palette,” in History Now 73 (Winter 2024) https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-now “

Falling Houses: Linden Hills and Poe’s Legacy in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction.” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation. Volume 56: (2023) 102-199.

“Surely as Gay as it was Black: The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age” in The LGBTQ+ History Book. DK publishers. 2023. Sherrard-Johnson 3

“Sensing Black Coral,” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Issue 30.1-Spring 2023.

“Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism,” The Cambridge History of American Modernism. Ed. Mark Whalan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

“The Serial Pleasures of Reading Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins,” in “Yours for Humanity”: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. JoAnn Pavletich. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023.

““High Water and the Limits of Humanity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” in Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great American Fiction. Ed John Gruesser. Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 2022. [ Reviewed in Choice; Highly Recommended; Poe Studies 56: 2023; Mark Twain Annual (Volume 21, 2023)]

“Illustrating, Publishing, and the Female Artists of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Imprinted: Illustrating Race. Norman Rockwell Museum, 2022.

“New Negro Literary Décor: Competing Tastes in the 1920s.” African American Literature in Transition, 1920– 1930, edited by Miriam Thaggert and Rachel Farebrother, vol. 9, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022, pp. 19–45. African American Literature in Transition.

“New Negro Autobiographies.” In J. Moody (Ed.), A History of African American Autobiography (pp. 120-141). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. [2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award; Reviewed in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies ] “

The Weight of Paradise,” in Hidden Compass Magazine. August 2021. [Winner of the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing of the Year 2023] https://hiddencompass.net/story/the-weight-of-paradise/

“Sensing Black Coral,” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isab050, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab050 2021

“Ghostly Outlines,” English Language Notes. April 2021 59:1. 225-228.

“What I Learned About a Pioneering Black Cookbook Author By Cooking Her Recipes,” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-cookbook-by-black-woman 2020

“Harlem and the New Negro Renaissance” (Oxford African American Studies Center). “Driftless,” in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. Edited by Simmons Buntin, Derrick Sheffield, and Elizabeth Dodd. Texas: Trinity University Press, 2020.

“A Plea for Color: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta” American Literature. 76.4 (December 2004): 833- 869. Reprinted in Quicksand, Norton Critical Editions. Ed. Carla Kaplan. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.248- 257.

“Isle of Refuge” in Water~Stone Review 22 (2019). [Pushcart Prize Nomination 2019; Best American Notable Travel Writing of 2019]

“Saltworks” in Terrain.org. https://www.terrain.org/2019/nonfiction/saltworks/ [Finalist for the Fall 2018 Travel Writing Nowhere Magazine]

“Perfection with a hole in the middle”: Archipelagic Assemblage in Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning. Journal for Transnational American Studies (Summer 2019) 93-123. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10p015sb “

Frado, Linda, Ellen and Iola,” in Legacy: a journal of American Women Writers. 36.1 2019. Sherrard-Johnson 4 “

Jessie Redmon Fauset,” In Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. Ed. Gene Jarrett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

“Rose McClendon’s Playbill: The Vagabond Modernism of New Negro Theater.” solicited article for Feminist Cluster. Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. https://modernismmodernity.org/ (15pp) 2017.

“The New Negro.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. Ed. Gene Jarrett. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. “

“Insubordinate Islands and Coastal Chaos: Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Land/Seascapes” in Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture. Eds Michelle Stephens and Brian Roberts. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

“Revolutionary Potential: African Aesthetics in theDepression Era.” Solicited review essay of four books for American Literary History. American Literary History 2015; doi: 10.1093/alh/ajv005 (351-362)

“City Place/Country Place: Negotiating Class Geographies in Ann Petry’s Fiction” in Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side: Narratives Out of Time. Ed. Catherine Rottenberg. book chapter. Forthcoming, SUNY Press. 20pp

“The Geography of Ladyhood: Racializing the Novel of Manners” in The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature. Ed. Dale Bauer. Cambridge University Press: Forthcoming June 2012. 404-421.

“Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture and African American Literature” in The Blackwell Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. London: Blackwell, 2010. 227-242.

“Dorothy West’s Typewriter: A Short Story of the Harlem Renaissance” in Special Issue on the Twenties of Letterature D’America. Anglo American Issue. (2009): 55-78.

“Houston Baker, Jr”. and “Zora Neale Hurston” in Encyclopedia of African Thought. Edited Biodun Jeyifo. New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2009. (8pp).

“Transatlantic Collaborations: Visual Culture and African American Literature” in The Blackwell Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Forthcoming Blackwell 2010. (20pp).

“Racial Recovery, Racial Death: An Introduction in Four Parts” (co-authored with P. Gabrielle Foreman). Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 24.2 (2007): 157-170.

“Radical Tea: Racial Misrecognition and the Politics of Consumption in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls At Cottage City.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 24.2 (2007): 225-247.

“A Plea for Color: Nella Larsen’s Mulatta Iconography,” American Literature. 75th Anniversary Issue 76.4 (December 2004): 833-869.

“This plague of their own locusts”: Space, Property and Identity in Dorothy West’sThe Living is Easy.” African American Review. 38.4 (Winter 2004): 609-624.

“Delicate Boundaries: Passing and other ‘Crossings’ in Fictionalized Slave Narratives” in A Companion to American Fiction 1780-1865. Ed Shirley Samuels. London: Blackwell, 2004.204-215.

“The Colonizing? Figure of the Mother in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of my Mother” in MaComère. Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. 2 (1999).

SPECIAL ISSUES:
Special Issue on “Racial Identity, Indeterminacy, and Identification in the Nineteenth Century. “ Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (co-edited with P. Gabrielle Foreman). 24.2 (2007):147-350.

REVIEWS:
Review of Eric Gardner’s Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2007. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. (2009):26.1, pp. 172-174.

Review of Eva Allegra Raimon’s The Tragic Mulatta Revisited (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2004) and Teresa Zackodnik’s The Mulatta and the Politics of Race. (Mississippi: Univ. of Miss., 2004) Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. (2006): 23.2, 206-207.

“Conjuring the Folk Aesthetic” Review of Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown’s Crossing Borders Through Folklore in Novel: A Forum for Fiction. (Fall 1999): 33.3..

Fiction and poetry:
“A Woman’s Ambition” in Feminist Studies. Vol. 33.3. (Fall 2007). 591-605.

“Mistress Lasiren Shipwrecks the Slave Ship Inspiration,” in Many Mountains Moving. Vol. 8 2006. 226-227.

“Residual,” “Picnic,” “Girls Named Peaches,” “Watermelon Repast,” in The Ringing Ear. Edited by Nikky Finney. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

“The Hot Comb’s Hickey,” accepted for Beauty Anthology. Edited by Pamela Gemin.

“Whistler’s Walk,” in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art. 18.2. MSS 25pp.

“Parade of Flesh,” Gathering Ground: a Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Edited by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. Intro. by Harryette Mullen and Elizabeth Alexander. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

“The Dictator’s Wife, Or Mildred Aristide Prepares to Address the Congressional Black Caucus,” Crab Orchard Review:“Ten Years After: Documenting a Decade, 1995-2005.”10.2 (Summer/Fall 2005)

“Mesh of Pink, “Salon,” “Lena-Straum,” and “The State of Missouri vs. Celia, A Slave,” in Black Arts Quarterly. 9.2 (Spring/Summer 2004)

“The Quality of Sand” in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. New York: Warner Books, 2004. Short Story. pp. 7-23.

“Yellow Brick Road” in Rosebud. 27 (2003): 61.

“Inside the Creole Mafia” in Slipstream. 22 (2002): 59.

“Why?” and “Rotation,” 5AM. 18 (2003).

“The Hot Comb’s Hickey.” Featured Poem. http://www.cavecanempoets.org/

“An Ole Cypress Song” in River Crossings: Voices Of The Diaspora: An Anthology on the International Black Experience. Los Angeles: International Black Writers & Artists, 1994.

“Three Shades of Indigo,” in Colored Women Colored Wor(l)ds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

“Imprints,” “Pygmalion Revisited,” “Impressions,” “New York, Day After Thanksgiving, 1995,” Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review. 12. (1997) 54-61.

RECENT CONFERENCE PAPERS AND INVITED TALKS

“Runaway New Negroes: Re-imagining Fugitivity in Interwar Memoir,” Invited Panelist. African American Literature Symposium. University of Texas, San Antonio. April 12, 2016.

“Dorothy West’s Quiet Activism,” presented at American Studies Association Conference. Toronto, Canada. October 7-10, 2015.

“Harlem Style/Harlem Toile: Competing Tastes in the New Negro Renaissance,” present at Restaging the Harlem Renaissance. Two-Day Symposium. Columbia University. June 2015.

Modern Language Association. “Harlem Style/Harlem Toile: Competing Tastes in the New Negro Renaissance” on “Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in African American Literary Traditions,” January 9, 2015 Vancouver, British Columbia.

“Modernist Studies and the Harlem Renaissance,” Invited Roundtable. Modern Language Association. January 11, 2014. Chicago, Illinois.

“New Directions in the Harlem Renaissance,” on “Harlem Renaissance Studies Now.” Invited Roundtable. MSA Brighton. Modernist Studies Association, August 31, 2013. University of Sussex.

“The Specter of Haiti and the Transnational Black Female Subject.” American Studies Association Conference. November 2012. San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Roundtable Participant. “Where Does Biography Belong? A Roundtable Discussion How Biographies Contribute to Ongoing Recovery of American Women Writers” Society of the Study of American Women Writer’s. October 10-13, 2012. Denver, Colorado.

Presentation on Pauline Hopkins. Panel organized by Dale Bauer. C19 Americanists Conference. April 12-15, 2012. Berkeley, CA.

“Pauline Hopkins’s Mesmerizing Modernism”

May 2012. American Literature Association Conference. San Francisco.

 “Dust Tracks on the Transatlantic Road: African American Women’s Self Portraits” (CAAR) Collegium for African American Research. Universite Charles V/University of Paris-Diderot. April 2011. Paris, France.

“To Russia with Love: Dorothy West’s Spiritual Sojourn Behind the Iron Curtain

Modern Language Association. Los Angeles, CA. January 6, 2011.

“Foreign Correspondent: Jessie Fauset’s Black Internationalism”

Modern Language Association. Los Angeles, CA. January 6, 20011.

“City Place/Country Place: Negotiating Class Geographies in Ann Petry’s Fiction.” American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction. Savannah, GA. October 2009.

“They Lost Us The Beach”: Dorothy West and the Geography of Class.” UW Institute for Race and Ethnicity System Wide Conference. April 16-17, 2009.

INVITED LECTURES, READINGS AND INTERVIEWS

Author talk and reading from Dorothy West’s Paradise. Rotary Club. Martha’s Vineyard. August 17, 2016.

Poetry Reading with Matthew Guenette and Oscar Miereles. Art + Literature Laboratory. March 11, 2016. Madison, WI.

Ann Bennett. Phone Interview. Firelight Media. Stanly Nelson’s documentary: Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Fiction Residents Reading. Vermont Studio Center. September 2015.

Interview on Maya Angelou. May 28, 2014. WKOW 27. Madison, WI .

The Best of our Knowledge. 15 minutes radio segment on the trope of the talking book in African American literature. NPR. December 2013. http://www.ttbook.org/book/talking-book

Cave Canem Prize Winners Reading. Poet’s House. New York University. November 1, 2013.

Bridge Poets IV Poetry Series. Reading at the Chazen Musuem of Art. November 7, 2013.

“Writing Dorothy West’s Paradise.” A Book Talk at Lechayim (Madison Jewish Community Center) May 6, 2013

Interview. Byron Barnett. Urban Update. WHTV. Boston. September 4, 2012.

Interview with Emily Auerbach and Norman Gilliland for “University of the Air.” Wisconsin Public Radio. 8/26/12

Author Talk and Reading from Dorothy West’s Paradise, Martha’s Vineyard Museum. Edgartown, Massachusetts. June 21, 2012.

Poetry Reading with Marilyn Nelson (former poet laureate of Connecticut) and Soul Mountain fellows. University of Connecticut-Storrs. July 10, 2009.

SELECTED GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE COURSES :
Toni Morrison; Freedom and Slavery in the American Literary Imagination, 19th Century African American Women’s Writing, Caribbean Women’s Writing, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Dissertation Workshop, Major American Novelists, Narratives of Passing in American Literature and Culture (Honors Course), ( Honors FIG) Freedom and Slavery in the American Literary Imagination, The American Novel before 1914, The American Novel before 1914, Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Modernism, Narratives of Passing in American Literature and Culture.

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars
Modern Language Association.
Society For The Study of American Women Writers
College Language Association
American Studies Association
Modernist Studies Association