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Biography

Marquita R. Smith graduated from Rutgers University, Newark with a B.A. in Journalism and an M.A. in English in 2009. She received her Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University in 2015. Her book project, Beyond the Hold: Black Women's Narratives of Care and Carcerality​ (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), offers an exploration of how contemporary black women’s writing clarifies and theorizes the multiple forms of both power and resistance within a carceral culture, arguing that such intimate representations reveal the assumptions that shape our lived experiences and expand our capacity to imagine a freer future. In 2018 she was awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now renamed the Institute for Citizens & Scholars) and is a recipient of a 2022 NEH Summer Stipend. Her work has been published in venues such as The Black Scholar, James Baldwin Review, Postcolonial Text, Popular Music and Society, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions, The Puritan Magazine, and Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times. Her teaching and research interests include African American literature and culture, hip-hop studies, gender and sexuality, and critical race studies. ​