2023 DC Queer Studies Symposium Speaker Bios

Dr. Briona Jones, University of Connecticut

Briona Simone Jones is Assistant Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a multi-award-winning writer, scholar, and editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (The New Press, 2021), the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian Thought to date. Jones is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, conducting archival research in Black lesbian poet and scholar, Cheryl Clarke's papers. 

Dr. Jennifer Williams, Howard University

Jennifer D. Williams is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Dr. Williams is completing a book on Black women’s literature and urban segregation. You can find her other publications in A/B: Autobiography Studies, The Black Scholar, Meridians, and Contemporary Women's Writing, among other places.

Dr. K. Marshall Green, University of Delaware

K. Marshall Green is a shapeshifting Black Queer Feminist nerd: an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world; a scholar, poet, facilitator, filmmaker; and an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity with specializations in Gender Studies and Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is completing his memoir, A Body made Home: they Black Trans Love (The Feminist Press). He is a proud founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). Instagram and Twitter: @drDrummerBoiG

Dr. LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Georgetown University

LaMonda Horton-Stallings is chair and professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. As L.H. Stallings, she is the author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life (Indiana UP, 2020), A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (University of California Press, 2019); Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2015); Mutha’ is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2007).

Dr. LaVelle Q. Ridley, Ohio State University

Lavelle Ridley is a queer black transexual writer, mentor, and dreamer whose interests emerged from the intersection of transgender studies, black feminist theory, and life writing studies. She currently serves as a President's Postdoctoral fellow in Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley and, beginning Fall 2024, will be Assistant Professor of Queer/Trans* Studies at the Ohio State University. Ridley earned her PhD in English & Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan. She has published in academic journals such ass GLQ, Feminist Studies, and TSQ, the latter for which she serves as Associate book Review Editor. Ridley is working on her book manuscript which articulates how life writing by black trans women functions as tools for political resistance and imaginative freedom-making for the gendered-racially-sexually oppressed.

Dr. Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland

Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in 20th and 21st century African American literature.  Her monograph, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014) received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. She has edited three collections of African American literature: Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (Random House, February 1991; Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women, reprinted Doubleday/Anchor, January 1990; and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, Doubleday/Anchor, September 1987.  From 1976-1980, she was the Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit.  From 1980 to 1990, she taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.  She was president of The American Studies Association from 1996-1997 and was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015.  Her current project is Afterlives: Legacies of the Black Literary Left.

Dr. Matthew Richardson, University of California Santa Barbara 

Matt Richardson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He has published articles in various academic journals such as TSQ, GLQ, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, The Journal of Women’s History and Black Camera. He also has published fiction and poetry in publications like Pharos and Sinister Wisdom and Feminist Studies. His monograph is entitled, The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution (2013). He is a member of the Black Sexual Economies Collective and co-editor of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). He is co-editor of the journal Feminist Studies’ 2011 Special Issue on Race and Transgender Studies and the 2017 special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly’s The Issue of Blackness. His first novel, Black Canvas: A Campus Haunting, is published by Transgress Press (2022).

King Molasses

King Molasses (They/them) is an award-winning nonbinary drag king and performing artist based in Washington DC. They currently reign as DC’s Best Drag King as voted by the Washington Blade Magazine and the DC Drag Awards, winning the title consecutively from 2022 to 2024.

A DMV native from Prince George’s County, MD, Molasses debuted in 2018 and has since become a fixture in the district’s performing arts and entertainment scene. Their drag is a call to mindfulness, black surrealism, and heritage-based movements that dare to create images of self-liberation. Their performance work has been commissioned in venues all over the country, including the John F. Kennedy Center, the National Portrait Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Berlin NightClub in Chicago and the historic Club Cumming in NYC. Molasses has been featured in The Washington Post, NPR’s 1A, Vox and the Washington CIty Paper.  

Their performance work has been commissioned for the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 9:30 Club, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Club Cumming in NYC. They’re a headlining feature at the queer events held all over the DMV.

Safiyah Dawkins

Safiyah Dawkins is a junior majoring in Family Social Sciences and minoring in Black Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. Safiyah is a native of Prince George’s County Maryland, and a graduate of Gwynn Park High School in Brandywine, MD. She is an aspiring Fire Chief. She has taken several classes in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies including, Race and Rebel Media, Bodies in Contention, and Pleasure, Intimacy and Violence, and, of course, An Introduction to Black Women’s Studies.