Cherene Sherrard is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance and Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, and her debut poetry collection, Vixen, was published in 2017. Her creative nonfiction and poetry has been published in The Rumpus, Plume, the New York Times Magazine, Verse Daily, the Journal, Terrain.org, Blackbird, Water~Stone Review, Prairie Schooner, and others.