Kemeshia Randle Swanson, a college professor, is currently serving a joint appointment in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. She previously dedicated ten years of service to the Department of English at Garner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Her work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, southern literature, gender and sexualities studies, and hip-hop and popular culture. She has published in edited collections such as Words, Beats, and Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture; Like One of the Family: Domestic Workers, Race, and In/Visibility in "The Help"; and Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. She is author of Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, published by University Press of Mississippi.