Research Expertise and Interest

poetry and poetics, African American literature, intellectual history - 1920s to the present, Black Geography/Cultural Geography

Research Description

Chiyuma Elliott is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics and African American intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Elliott has published four books of poetry: Blue in Green (2021), At Most (2020), Vigil (2017), and California Winter League (2015). Her creative work has appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She is the co-editor of several poetry chapbooks, including African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner (2015 / U Press of Mississippi), and Of Rivers ( 2016 / Southern Humanities Review). She is currently at work on a book of poems called Hemland, and a scholarly monograph about rural life in the Harlem Renaissance, and co-hosts a podcast called Old-School (on the intersections of African American Studies and the classics).