She earned her B.A. in English from Johnson C. Smith University, her M.A. in African American Studies from Temple University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At UMA, she researched the history, memory, and contemporary imagination of Black frontier settlements in the Oklahoma Territory. Her areas of scholarly interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africana literature, especially migration, nationalism, and transnationalism narratives. She is currently directing her third cohort of Yerby Scholars—students at Paine who are engaged in primary and secondary research regarding the life and literary contributions of the prolific Frank G. Yerby (Paine College, Class of 1937). In 2013, she was awarded the Vulcan Materials Teaching Excellence Award.