Associate Professor & Co-Chair, @UMichEducation. Author of The Dark Fantastic. FAMU 🐍. 1913 ❤️. She/her. Next: Shifter & Dreamer (@LEEandLOW/@TuBooks, 2025).
Jun 3, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Unless you're flying internationally on certain airlines, private flights ARE the new first class / business class.... which is why The Rest of Us can now access FC/BC. It's no longer inaccessible.
But this is what happens in this nation of temporarily embarrassed rich people.
First class is great if you've got special travel needs. But flying 20-30 years ago, planes had way more room, were cleaner, airports were less crowded, and the travel experience was far more pleasant than it is now.
This isn't just about individuals. It's about *corporations.*
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
*stares @ camera*
This is why children's authors, classroom teachers, librarians, and yes, *children's literature professors* have received threats since long before the (latest wave of) book bans...
*Whose work does the power structure feel most threatens their control?* And trust me, it's not just about inclusion in highly commercialized multimedia projects...
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Expectations for Black professors:
--decolonize research and writing
--design and teach transformative courses
--be maximally available for everyone
--(over)serve a profession that doesn't have enough of us to go around
--organize these streets (bc academic work is meaningless!)
--cultivate perfect life balance outside of the academy (don't be that out of touch academic with no life!)
--be financially secure at a time of late capital, global precarity, and academic austerity (so what if we have student loans? who cares if we have pay for conferences?)
1. Currently, there's a Tweet circulating about famous academics "hiring" agents... and that's not really how the process works, as everyone on the creative side of publishing knows.
2. You don't need an agent to publish on the academic or the trade side. But here's the thing...
Jun 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
90% of the mentoring conflict I've faced over the past 13 years is because many grad students don't realize this:
I just watched this sci fi movie where people jump into the future to fight some war and they're not told the nature of the enemy in advance in order to have enough troops...
A little exaggerated, but that is what we are doing when we encourage The Rest of Us to get PhDs. 😂
Being childfree has changed from a stigmatized status to a vocal movement. I understand why given Republican attacks on reproductive freedom, but a lot of the anti-child/anti-parent rhetoric gives me pause.
What she said was horrible AND you can read it and worse on r/childfree.
And yes, some Black folk (+ people from all over) put a dash on their watermelon.
Within our community, it falls within the "salt or sugar on grits" and "is your cornbread sweet of savory" debates.
Jun 1, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It's hilarious to read ridicule #onhere about studying children's stories and/or fairy tales and fantasy. Have seen a few of these takes; will not amplify.
Those of us in these subfields hear this all the time. We are quite used to it. We get the shade from our colleagues, too.
"It's just a children's story." The same stories that the Republicans are doing their best to ban? That they're building their 2024 electoral case by manufacturing outrage around them?
Be for real. 🤣😂
May 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Yes, most graduate faculty answer emails in the summer. All the time. That's because we have year-long research projects.
Generally, I think many (most?) faculty share our summer schedules with advisees, and (of course, it should also be) vice versa...
In my doctoral program, we read written exams and dissertation chapters over the summer. And so in April, we meet and plan.
Which weeks will you be traveling/away? OK, I'll be away these weeks. Let's meet X, X, and X.
May 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Lifting up a different POV for my Tweets from this morning.
I agree with you. Our elders' silence didn't protect us. It didn't protect them either. I'm frustrated that the current adult gens aren't equipped to deal with the second Redemption (credit to @AdamSerwer).
I used to be critical about our elders' silence until I revisited Beloved for the fourth time. I read it too early. It horrified me in high school. I said I preferred other work in college. After the film, I read it as spec fic.
This generation with big "representation doesn't matter!" energy is about to experience what the world was like without it.
They take quite a bit for granted. (This is why I've been asking since early 2018, "Is this moment due to our movements? Or is it truly lasting change?")
May 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I said I wasn't going to RT anything directly about it, because I have a Platform and a Voice, and it's not about me, but what the hell...
All of this.
Book Twitter, Google the phenomenon of the glass cliff. *Now.*
In 2020, I called out some of the pervasive antiblackness in children's literature, and burned a lot of bridges. I see not much has changed in three years.
Black people in children's books are still Black, people.
That's all I've got tonight. Just SMH about all of this mess.
May 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The difference between academia and the creative industries is this. In academia, we're much more interdependent.
Creative industries remind me of that quote from Keri Russell's Kate Wyler in The Diplomat: "We exist in a network of favors." If you're not inside those networks...
At my first NCTE and ALAN, Indy '04, I roomed with a longtime publicist who'd been doing marketing for children's books since the 60s and 70s.
She knew everyone in publishing and took me to all the receptions. I was dazzled. "Everyone's so nice!" It felt like I was in a movie..
May 9, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Those claiming that Bridgerton and associated media are cultural appropriation live in an alternate universe where the past 500 years didn't happen.
Global South diasporas aren't appropriating British culture. Our ancestors were violently forced to assimilate to your culture.
The repercussions have lasted to this day.
As I said in September, we're Tweeting in English. for many millions of us, this is our primary language. For most of Black America, this is our mother tongue.
Hundreds of millions of us have spoken this language for centuries.
May 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Adored every single note of this!
(Can't believe my fave Alicia album is 20 years old. 👵🏿)
I'll admit that I'm in tears. This video is beautiful!
"Hand me the world on a silver platter,
And what good would it be?
With no one to share,
With no one who truly cares for me..."
May 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Growing up, I always longed to see myself in the fantastic.
I didn't necessarily need to see myself in Queen Victoria's grandmother or in Julius Caesar and Marc Antony's lover.
I'm so glad our creatives are eating! I'm not invested in certain historical figures being Black.
I haven't commented on the Cleopatra controversy because I couldn't care less. In elementary school, we were taught "she was Black like you and me," but in college, we were taught no, she was Greek.
I did notice that certain folks used it as an opportunity to drag Black America.
May 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Update: My mother was eager to watch Queen Charlotte and urged me to begin right away. In the midst of a nighttime Succession watch, but stopped to catch up w/ her.
Visual spectacle. It made me want to reconsider some of the points I made in The Dark Fantastic about racebending.
The actors, as always, did a beautiful job! Luminous work. I have mixed feelings about the premise of race in the Bridgerton universe.
Don't have much more to say other than "when I longed to see myself in the fantastic, I didn't realize that I didn't want or need some mirrors."
May 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Tenured faculty (worth their salt) (should) review far more than junior TT & contingent faculty. Full professors review and write LORs far more than us associates...
That is 100% the norm among faculty in my field. Can't speak for elsewhere in academia.
There are certain kinds of reviews that you cannot do unless you're tenured - for instance, tenure cases.
As an associate, I can't review for full professor. There are university and national committees we can't serve on. And so on. The responsibility ratchets UP, not down.
May 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you think peer review is in crisis, what's going to happen to rec letter norms beyond us Gen X/Millennial cuspers?
That is also part of the peer system. Some of us write dozens of LORs/yr, not just for students, for peers. It's how folks get jobs, tenure, and promotion...
There's been tons of noise about professors writing, or not writing, rec letters. But it's deeper than that.
When a tenure letter request comes through, you MUST write the letter or provide a potentially career-sinking (for the other person) reason why.
May 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This, and I'd like to add that the labor of editors, *editorial assistants* (graduate students), and the editorial review board is also uncompensated in most cases.
Sure, you get credit for being on the editorial team, and you have a modicum of power, but it's a ton of uncompensated labor over several years for everyone involved.
Also, I'm in the camp that believes you should list the journals you've reviewed for on your CV. I always have.
Apr 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
American exceptionalism means that our ancestors became aliens from outer space when they landed at Port Comfort, Charleston, and New Orleans.
Of course we eat rice, just like the global majority do. LOL. Humanity has been eating cereal grains for hundreds of thousands of years.
In fact, many of our ancestors were specifically brought to this colony/country, including the Lowcountry where 100% of my mama's ancestors came from, to grow rice.
You can't grow rice in northern Europe. Enslaved laborers from West Africa provided that specific expertise.
