She is the author of Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (2006), which received the John Hope Franklin Center Manuscript Prize and the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize. She is currently working on her second book, A Ghastly Find: Mary Hannah Tabbs and the Case of the Disembodied Torso, Philadelphia 1887.