SX Blog

With great pleasure, the Small Axe Project welcomes Simone A. James Alexander to the sx salon editorial team, taking over the role of Book Reviews Editor from Ronald Cummings. Simone is an eminent scholar of Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature with particular attention to the work of women writers; we are so grateful for the erudition, experience and commitment that she brings to this role. Her biography follows:

Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. Her primary areas of research include women, gender, and sexuality studies; postcolonial literature; transnational feminist theory; Caribbean and migration and diaspora studies. She is the author of the award-winning monograph African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship, which also received Honorable Mention from the African Literature Association’s Book of the Year Scholarship Award. Alexander is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women and coeditor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes, including Journal of West Indian Literature, L’Esprit Créateur, African American Review, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies, African Literature Today, Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and MLA Approaches to Teaching Gaines: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Work (Modern Language Association). Her current book projects include Bodies of (In)Difference: Intimacy, Desirability and the Politics and “Poetics of Relation” and Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions. She is also the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Colson Whitehead. She serves on the editorial boards of Tulsa Studies in Women Literature, SAGE Publications, and Kosmos Publishers (Gender Studies and Equality).