Savannah, Georgia provokes an imaginative reaction to the histories of all peoples who have ever inhabited the area---a quality of the city that has intrigued me since my arrival in 2013. I moved to the greater Savannah area when I accepted a tenure-track job at East Georgia State College where I have thrived. Currently, I am an Associate Professor of English. I have seventeen years of teaching experience. My Ph.D. is in Literary and Cultural Studies with an emphasis in Modern and Contemporary American Literature and specializing in African American Literature and American Southern Literature. I also hold a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in Textual Studies, and a graduate certificate in African American Literature. I received my Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Tennessee-Martin with a major in English and a minor in Journalism.   

Research Summary: I Identify as a Narratologist 

 As a fiction writer, I am interested in textual forms, structures, styles, and language. These elements also help me answer the research questions I have after a text has intellectually engaged me. I particularly pay close attention to the performances of social identities and the linguistic freeplay found in textual representations of hegemonic structures and the countering of those structures. I form my interpretations using close reading skills that open up subtextual, metatextual, extratextual, intertextual, and paratextual approaches. 

My article "Telling the White Man: Decoding the Gendered Blues and Domestic Violence in Hurston's 'Sweat' and Faulkner's 'That Evening Sun'" is an intertextual study that ultimately reveals that the stories implicate systematic racism as a major contributing factor of domestic abuse within African American homes. The article is published in Southeastern Missouri State University Press' The Faulkner Conference Series book Faulkner and Hurston (2017). 

My article "'Skeered to Holler": Secret Lovers 'Hot and Hidden' Between the Narrative Gaps of The Sound and the Fury" presents a new and provocative reading of the novel, even as it points to Miss Quentin as the bi-racial offspring of T.P. and Caddy. I read the silences within the narrative gaps in order to illuminate the biracial romance that causes Quentin to interject incest into his narrative as a way to hide the secret the family protects. The article is published in Salem Press' Critical Insights The Sound and the Fury.   

My article, "The Chronometric Nose within the Chronotopic Novel Midnight’s Children,” is published in an essay collection: Diasporic Identities and Empire Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes. The article examines Rushdie's literary style and concludes that he blended Western narrative techniques with those of India and created a hybrid narrative technique that allows him to present a historical record and critique of India. I hope to one day use the article for a book project, as there is much more to present than an article-length project allows.  

My article, “Playing in the Dark: Blackness in White Ontology,” is the foundation for much of my research interests, and it appears in the Summer 2011 special issue: Transcultural Theory Part 2 of Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal. The article structures a global conversation regarding representations of blackness and the ideology surrounding the identity of an African presence.