Monifa Love

Education

• PhD, The Florida State University, English (with distinction)
• MA, The Florida State University, English
• AB, Princeton University, Anthropology (cum laude)

Areas of Expertise

Liberatory Pedagogies, Creative Writing, African American Cultural Expression, Poetry, Narratives of Enslavement and Imprisonment, Autobiography and Memoir, African American Literature and Literary Theory, African Film, Film and Society, and Mindfulness in the Classroom.

Biography

Love is the author of Provisions (1989) and Dreaming Underground (2003, Naomi Long Madgett Award winner). In 1997, she founded Home Base Women, a women's poetry chorus;  they toured for five years. In 2015, Love was a fellow at the "Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement" institute and moderated a webinar with poet Nikky Finney whom she had interviewed for Furious Flower II (California Newsreel, 2005). She was featured in the 2020-21 Library of Congress series "The Poet and the Poem." An African Cinema Institute fellow, she has published numerous essays on visual artists, writers, musicians, and film. Love has authored several fine arts catalogs, including "….my magic pours secret libations" for the exhibition she curated of women artists. She is the co-author with Charles Mills of Romancing Harlem: A Life in Love (2009), a cultural memoir of Harlem. Love's award-winning experimental novel, Freedom in the Dismal (1998), is taught at universities in the US and Europe and will be translated into French and German in 2022. She is co-editor of two projects on philosopher William R. Jones for Bloomsbury (2022). Love is at work on “Divination,” a collection of essays.

Research Interests

• Philosophies of Liberation
• Race and Technology
• Writing
• Literatures of the African Diaspora
• Music of the 20th Century
• Anthropology of Consciousness

Memberships & Affiliations

• Toni Morrison Society

• Langston Hughes Society

• College Language Association

• African Literature Association

• College English Association