Personal Effects

Emily Bernard is a professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of
Vermont. Her publications include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes
and Carl Van Vechten (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Some of My
Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004), which was chosen as a New York Public
Library Book for the Teen Age, 2006. Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009),
a book she coauthored with Deborah Willis, received an NAACP Image Award in spring 2010.
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White was published by Yale University Press in 2012.

Jenn Brandt is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at High Point University, where
she is also an assistant professor of English. Brandt’s work focuses on gender and cultural
studies in literature, popular film, and television. She is particularly interested in the ways
in which politics shape and reflect contemporary literature and culture.

Jennifer-Ann DiGregorio Kightlinger studies and teaches Italian American literature,
nineteenth- and twentieth- century American literature, and international modernism. Her
recent work examines representations of food in Italian American literature. She is currently
co- editing Advocacy and Activism: Italian Heritage and Cultural Change, a volume of collected papers for IASA (Italian American Studies Association).

Joshua Fausty is associate professor of English at New Jersey City University, where he teaches
courses on literature, film, composition, the essay, and creative nonfiction. His articles, interviews, reviews, and creative nonfiction appear in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; TutteStorie; Afterall; VIA: Voices in Italian Americana; The Paterson Literary Review; and Screening Ethnicity.

John Gennari is associate professor of English and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University
of Vermont. He is the author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006), winner of the
2007 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Book in American Cultural Studies, and of a 2007
ASCAP– Deems Taylor Award for excellence in popular music criticism.

Benjamin D. Hagen received his PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island in 2012
and now serves as the English program coordinator at its College of Continuing Education. He teaches courses in modern literature and critical theory. His research on Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens has been published in journals such as Modernism / Modernity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Kym Ragusa is the author of The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging
(2006). A finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 2007 Legacy Award in Nonfiction, it won the Premio John Fante, a literary prize for writers of the Italian diaspora. Her essays have
appeared in several anthologies, as well as in the journals Leggendaria and TutteStorie. Her films Passing and fuori/outside have been shown on PBS and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. She teaches writing at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at MIT.