This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is with Anna LaQuawn Hinton, assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) and CLA Journal, as well as contributed to The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature. Her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, which approaches themes in Black feminist literary studies such as aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability frame, is now available through the University Press of Mississippi. Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.