Ebony Lumumba

Dr. Ebony Lumumba is professor and chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Jackson State University, where she teaches global and American literatures. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Mississippi, an M.A. in English from Georgia State University, and a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from Spelman College.

Her scholarship focuses on postcolonial literatures of the Global South, Black women's writing, and Black mothering as resistance. Her work has appeared in the Eudora Welty Review and numerous scholarly collections, including Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty, New Essays on Welty, Class, and Race, and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the African American Novel and Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison. She is co-editor, with Dorothy Abbott, of A Generation Full of Courage: The 21st Century Mississippi Writers Anthology. A creative writer as well as a scholar, her work has appeared in Callaloo, the College Language Association Journal, and Darling Nikki, and she is completing a speculative novel centered on a matrilineal lineage of African-descended water women.

Dr. Lumumba serves on the boards of the Foundation for Mississippi History and the Mississippi Book Festival and advises several Mississippi arts and humanities organizations. She is also founder of Mothers Obtaining Justice and Opportunities (MOJO), which supports mothers pursuing higher education, and owner and principal artist of OraAlease Designs. She and her husband, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, have two daughters, Alaké and Nubia.