Kemeshia Randle Swanson

Kemeshia Randle Swanson, a college professor, is currently serving a joint appointment in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. She previously dedicated ten years of service to the Department of English at Garner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Her work focuses on 20th/21st Century African American literature, Southern Literature, gender and sexualities studies, and Hip Hop and popular culture. She has published in edited collections such as Words, Beats, and Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture; Like One of the Family: Domestic Workers, Race, and In/Visibility in “The Help”; and Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. She is the author of Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability—which won the Eudora Welty Prize and was nominated for the MAAH Stone Book Award—and the forthcoming edited collection, Conversations with Jesmyn Ward, both published by University Press of Mississippi.