Biography

Marquita R. Smith graduated from Rutgers University, Newark with a B.A. in Journalism and an M.A. in English, and received her Ph.D. from McMaster University in 2015. Her book project, Writing Black Life Beyond the Prison, 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. Her critical writing on the intersections of sexuality, race, and gender in African American and Black diasporic literature and culture appears 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 Beyonce 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. She was awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2018. ​