Professor of English, Florida State University
Dr. Maxine Lavon Montgomery is a professor of English. She is the author or editor of seven books – most recently, The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), a project that interrogates tropes of catastrophe and renewal in fiction and visual culture by writers and performing arts in a circum-Caribbean and United States geography, from Octavia E. Butler to Beyonce. As a nationally recognized scholar on the fiction of Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, Professor Montgomery is the recipient of a 2021-22 National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant for “Engaging Black Women’s Archives: Gloria Naylor and Twentieth Century Literary History.” Her areas of academic specialization include contemporary Black women’s fiction, Postapocalyptic Literature and Culture, African American Literature and Culture, Gender Studies, and Digital Humanities.