Annette Debo

Annette Debo is a professor of English at Western Carolina University in the mountains of North Carolina, and she writes on 20th and 21-century literature. Her most recent book is The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry (Northwestern UP, 2024). This book argues that poets today are shifting the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and they write a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.

She has also published three books about the modernist writer H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) who was part of the expatriate circles of the early twentieth century. Her The American H.D. weaves together archival research and cultural history to tell a new story about the significance of nation in H.D.’s artistic vision and life. She edited H.D.’s Within the Walls and What Do I Love?, short stories and poems written in London in the midst of the Blitz and later years of World War II. She also co-edited the MLA Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose.