Research
“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, street lit (or contemporary African American urban fiction) employed materiality and the collective memories of its readership to create political and social commentaries on contemporary black life…
Books and Beats: The Cultural Kinship of Street Lit and Hip Hop is a literary culture project that considers how Street Lit and Hip Hop are cultural cousins that symbiotically catapulted black expressive youth culture into America’s consciousness at the turn of the twenty-first century...
Many Street Lit novels balance a precarious line of telling cautionary tales and glamorizing street culture, which is full of prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, drug dealers, and abusers…
Essence Magazine occupies a distinct position within the continuum of Black culture as an aspirational lifestyle magazine, grounded by a simple but radical ethos; “Black women come first.” Historically, the magazine has been the meeting point for celebrity and Black intellectual thought, with some of the most prolific Black writers, actors, professors, and singers filling its pages…
