She is the author of A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006 and is currently editing James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, for W.W. Norton's Critical Edition series (forthcoming, 2009). Her third book project moves farther into the 20th century with its focus on post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement African American writing. Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Cultures of the 1940s and 1950s explores the literary cosmopolitanism that distinguishes Black fiction and poetry writing of the era, and argues for Chicago's centrality to fostering this generation's aesthetic worldliness.