“This was no love story,” Nikky Finney cautions us in “Pluck.” The poem from her 1995 collection, Rice, is a repudiation of Hollywood’s insidious fantasies about sex and American slavery. Prompted by …

Qiana Whitted
Qiana Whitted is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at University of South Carolina. A graduate of Hampton University with a PhD from Yale, her research focuses on African American literary and cultural studies as well as American comic books. She is author of the monograph, “A God of Justice?”: The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature and co-editor of the collection, Comics and the U.S. South.