Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023).  Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Rachel Mundy is an Associate Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture, & Media program at Rutgers University in Newark. She specializes in twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies. Her work shows how music has been used to navigate changing boundaries between race, species, and culture during a century of social and ecological crisis.

Rachel’s work has been cited as initiating an “animal turn” in music studies. She has published widely and given invited talks for audiences at institutions including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Eastman, and Lincoln Center.

Rachel locates herself within a broad movement in the arts and sciences towards new ideas about human identity, nature, and culture in an era of social and ecological crisis. Her classes explore sound in the history of science, animals and posthumanism, Newark’s soundscapes, and Western traditions in a global context. Rachel is also a licensed teacher of the Japanese traditional flute or shakuhachi, which she has played and performed since 2001.