bio
Originally from Windsor, Ontario, I have taught in the Department of English at Texas Tech University since 2004. I am the author of the book Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006), which won the TTU President’s Book Award for Outstanding Faculty Publication. In addition to publishing a range of academic articles and book chapters on African American literature, American modernism, and music, I also wrote on jazz regularly for Coda magazine for ten years, from 1999 to 2009. Currently, I serve as Director of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech.
publications
books
Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006)
Editor, Jazz and American Culture. (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
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articles and book chapters
“Jelly Rolls, Jungle Music, and the Eternal Tom-Tom Beating of the Negro Heart: Teaching Jazz and Blues in the Harlem Renaissance.” Teaching the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Venetria K. Patton. New York: Modern Languages Association, forthcoming. 14pp.
“All That Jazz: Black Music as Muse.” The Cambridge History of African American Poetry. Ed. Keith Leonard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming. 20pp.
“Red Carpet Radicals: Public Feminist Scholarship and the Sexism|Cinema Film Series.” (authored with Donald E. Lavigne, Elizabeth A. Sharp, Jessica E. Smith, Dana A. Weiser, and Allison Whitney). Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community. Ed. Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn. Ann Arbor, MI: Lever Press, 2023. 19-36.
“Jazz, Performance, and Modernist Embodiment in Hughes’s Early Writing.” Langston Hughes in Context. Ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Anthony Reed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2023. 21-32.
“Steely Dan at 50,” Rock Music Studies 9.3 [Special Issue: “Steely Dan at 50”] (2022): 249-64.
“The Harlem Renaissance.” Ralph Ellison in Context. Ed. Paul Devlin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 219-229.
“‘Schoolboy Takes the Stage’: Albert Murray’s The Seven League Boots as Dramatization of an Aesthetic and Philosophy of Music.” MELUS 45.3 (2020): 129-151.
“The Sound of Jazz as Essential Image: Television, Performance, and the Modern Jazz Canon.” Jazz Research Journal 12.1 (2018): 12-35.
“‘Pushing Into Open Air’: Poetry, Art, and Public Space in Educating Audiences about Mass Incarceration.” (authored with Alfredo Aguilar, Shayla Corprew, Jill Murphy Elberson, Apryl Lewis, and Amelia Reyes). Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal.
“‘The Blues Always Been Here’: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism. Ed. Katherine O’Callaghan. New York: Routledge, 2018. 237-52.
“The ‘Professional’ Singer-Songwriter in the 1970s.” The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. Eds. Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 89-99.
“True Tales and 8 Mile Memoirs: Exploring the Imaginary City of Detroit.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41.1 (2008): 107-34.
“‘So Black, So Blue’: Ralph Ellison, Louis Armstrong and the Bebop Aesthetic.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. Special Issue: “Blue Notes: Toward a New Jazz Discourse.” 37.2 (2004): 261-84.
“A Synthesis of Racial Caress: Hybrid Modernism in the Jazz Poetry of William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy.” Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. Ed. Ian D. Copestake. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2004. 255-71.
“Queen of the Colonial Exposition: Josephine Baker’s Strategic Performance.” Critical Voicings of Black Liberation: Resistance and Representation in the Americas. Eds. Kimberley L. Phillips, Hermine Pinson, Lorenzo Thomas and Hanna Wallinger. Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. Volume 11. Munster, Germany: LIT, 2003. 47-65.
“Noisy Modernism: The Cultural Politics of Langston Hughes’s Early Jazz Poetry.” Langston Hughes Review. 17.1-2 (2002): 4-22.
“An Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker.” EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance. Eds. Alison Goeller and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies. Volume 4. Munster, Germany: LIT, 2001. 41-58.
Reprinted in The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist. Ed. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. 128-140.
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book reviews
Rev. of Gettin’ Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism by Jürgen E. Grandt. The ALH Online Review Series XXIV. 28 August, 2020.
Rev. of The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture by Dale Chapman, and Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon by Maxine Gordon. African American Review 52.3 (2019): 308-11.
Rev. of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz and People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds. ESC: English Studies in Canada 41.4 (2016): 132-8.
Rev. of Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature by Keren Omry and Writing the Future of Black America: Literature of the Hip-Hop Generation by Daniel Grassian. American Literature 82.4 (2010): 855-57.
Rev. of The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble. ESC: English Studies in Canada. 31.2-3 (2005): 349-52.
Rev. of Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems by Michael S.Harper. H-PCAACA: H-Net Reviews. November, 2000. <http://www.hnet.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=5599974403148.>
Rev. of Tadd: The Life and Legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron by Ian MacDonald. Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music March/April 2000: 40.
Rev. of How My Heart Sings, by Peter Pettinger. Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music March/April 1999: 15.
Rev. of The Progress of an Object in Motion, by Curtis Gillespie. Other Voices 11.1 (Spring 1998): 105-7.
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short articles, notes, encyclopedia entries
“Heard and Seen: Barry Harris Trio at the Village Vanguard.” Coda October/November 2008: 12.
“Jazz and Film at the Museum of Modern Art: Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (1974).” Coda October/November 2008: 20.
“Jazz Conquers Communism! Moscow on the Hudson (1984).” Coda August/September 2008: 19.
“Jazz is Weird Again: DOA (1950) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).” Coda May/June 2008: 43.
“OP’s Thriller of a Soundtrack: The Silent Partner (1978).” Coda Magazine March/April 2008: 12.
“‘Viva Italia!’: Jazz in Films by Italian Directors of the 1960s.” Coda Magazine January/February 2008: 12.
“Sun Ra in Space is the Place.” Coda Magazine November/December 2007: 14.
“Heard and Seen: Wynton Marsalis with the LCJO and Odadaa!” Coda Magazine November/December 2007: 16.
“Kansas City and American Theatricality.” Coda Magazine Sept/Oct 2007: 8.
“John Cassavetes’s Shadows: Blending Improvisation and Composition.” Coda Magazine May/June 2007: 10.
“Mysterioso Marketing.” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music September/October 2006: 12.
“Whither Eclecticism?” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music July/August 2006: 8.
“Good Night, and Good Jazz: Jazz in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.” Coda Magazine: The Journal of Jazz and Improvised Music January/February 2006: 9.
“Romare Bearden.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 102-03.
“Detroit, Michigan.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature . Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 417-21.
“Jazz.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. 844-49.
“Albert Murray.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1141-43.
“Not Without Laughter.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2004. 917-18.
“Shuffle Along.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1108-10.
“The Weary Blues.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1244-46.
“The Spread of Jazz-and-Literature Resources on the World Wide Web.” Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature 1.2 (Summer 1997): 41-7.
Teaching
Fall 2023
English 4312: Studies in Drama (“August Wilson’s Twentieth Century: Ten Plays”)
spring 2023
Fall 2022
English 3325: Modern and Contemporary American Literature (American Literature from 1900 to 1945)
spring 2022
Fall 2021
English 3325: Modern and Contemporary American Literature (American Literature from 1900 to 1945)
spring 2021
English 5380: Race, Rhetoric, and Performance
fall 2020
English 3392: African American Literature
fall 2019
English 2307: Introduction to Fiction (Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction)
English 3387: Multicultural Literatures of America
spring 2019
English 5380: Black Detroit: History, Theory, Culture
Fall 2018
English 2307: Introduction to Fiction (Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction)
English 2326: American Literature II (American Literature 1865 to the Present)
scholarly
interests
African American Literature
Jazz
American Modernism
Performance Studies
Film
Detroit
Social Justice
Crime Fiction
Education
university of alberta (Edmonton, AB)
PH.D., ENGLISH
Dissertation: “Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature”
Graduated 2002
university of windsor (Windsor, On)
M.A., ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING
Thesis: “Bye Bye Blackbird: A Collection of Stories”
Graduated 1996
university of windsor (windsor, On)
B.A. (Honours), ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING
Graduated 1994