Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (PDF)

Sequoia Maner is a poet-scholar and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She earned her B.A. in English from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her dissertation and book project, Liberation Aesthetics in the #BlackLivesMatter Era, examines how experimental poetics and performance bolster black social movements. Her essay on the performance of "quiet interiority" as collective praxis in Beyoncé's Lemonade is published in the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and her poem "upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland," finalist for the 2017 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, is published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora.

Emily Ruth Rutter is Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University, where she teaches courses in Multi-Ethnic American and African American Literature. She is the author of two monographs: Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line (University Press of Mississippi, 2018) and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Her research has been published in the journals African American Review, South Atlantic Review, Studies in American Culture, Aethlon, and MELUS. Her book chapter on African American women poets appears in A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, and a book chapter on Amiri Baraka and sports is forthcoming in Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State UP, 2021).

darlene anita scott is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Union University. She is a poet and visual artist whose research explores corporeal performances of trauma and the violence of silence. Her poetry has appeared in journals including J Journal, Quiddity, and The Baltimore Review, among others. Her art has been featured in The Journal, an arts and literature magazine of Ohio State University, and at The Girl Museum, a virtual museum celebrating girls and girlhood. Recipient of support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Delaware Division of the Arts, Tennessee Commission for the Arts, and College English Association, Scott's most recent project is a multi-media exploration, Breathing Lessons, which explores the role of the good girl as it is applied to girls of color.