Joanna Davis-McElligatt received her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Iowa in 2010. She is co-editor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2018), Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (U of Mississippi P, under contract), and BOOM! #*@&! Splat: Comics and Violence (U of Mississippi P, under contract). She is currently at work on her first monograph entitled Black and Immigrant: The New Black Diaspora in American Literature and Culture, a critical exploration of representations of immigrants of African descent to the U.S. from Afropolitans to Wakandan Americans. Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies.