Tiffany Cole is the Special Collections Archivist at James Madison University Libraries. She manages all aspects of collection processing and assists with collection development, reference, outreach, and instruction. She is a member of JMU’s Campus History Committee and, in her role as archivist, contributes to many local and university history initiatives.
Mollie Godfrey is Professor of English and African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at James Madison University. She is the author of Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow and the editor of Neo-Passing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow and Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry. She has codirected several community-engaged Black Digital Humanities projects, including Celebrating Simms and Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities.
Brooks E. Hefner is Professor of English at James Madison University. He is the author of The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism and Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow, the editor of George S. Schuyler’s Black Empire, and the coeditor of Claude McKay’s Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer. He is the codirector of the Digital Humanities project Circulating American Magazines.
Jeslyn Pool is a PhD candidate in American Literary Studies at the University of New Mexico, where her archival research is centered around diverse, transnational feminisms in the American hemisphere during the long nineteenth century. She assisted in the early transcription of Newman’s novel and preliminary contextual research on the project.
Leonard Richards Jr. is Assistant Professor of Education at James Madison University, where he teaches courses in diversity, classroom management, social science pedagogy, and Africana Studies. His most recent work, “Establishing a Culturally Responsive Classroom,” was published in the 2024 VASCD Journal. He is a member of the James Madison University Campus History Committee.
Mark Metzler Sawin is Professor of History and codirector of Honors at Eastern Mennonite University, where he also edits Emu Editions, a small press that publishes annotated editions of antebellum American popular fiction. Over the past decade, he has written and edited numerous works about the historic Black “Northeast Neighborhood” of Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Evan Sizemore is a graduate of the English Literature MA program at JMU. His focuses included applying theories of embodiment to disability studies and providing support to a number of digital humanities projects, including the AudiAnnotate Furious Flower Poetry Center Transcriptions project and Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities.
Ruth M. Toliver is a former teacher of English and African American Studies at School Without Walls, Washington, DC. She edited George Newman’s minutes in History of Kelley Street United Brethren in Christ Church and authored Keeping Up with Yesterday. She has received grants for summer study in England and for developing curricula using museums to enrich classroom instruction. She has presented numerous times on the history of Newtown in Harrisonburg.
Veronica T. Watson is Professor of English and the Ruth E. and Perry M. Morgan Endowed Professor in Southern Literature at Old Dominion University. She is the editor of The Short Stories of Frank Yerby, the author of The Souls of White Folks: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness, and the coeditor of Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions.
