Books
Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning was published in the Southern Foodways Alliance series Studies in People, Culture and Place from the University Press of Georgia, March 2019. Reviewed in The Journal of American History, The American Historical Review, African American Review, The Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others.
Classic Novels of the Harlem Renaissance, 2 volumes, editor, Library of America. September 2011. Reviewed in The San Francisco Chronicle; The Wall Street Journal; The [London] Times Literary Supplement; and other periodicals.
The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 6, Prose Fiction 1910-1950, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Contributed “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance”, pp. 283-352. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003.
We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870, Columbia University Press, 1997.
New Essays on Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, co-edited with Deborah Garfield. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh, ed. F. Nash Boney, Richard L. Hume, and Rafia Zafar. Mercer University Press, 1992.
Selected Essays
With Laura E. Helton, “Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction”, special issue African American Review Spring Summer 2021 (54. 1-2).
“How Toni Morrison Changed Fiction”, New York Daily News, August 6, 2019.
“James Baldwin: Some Degrees of Separation”. Library of America, October 12, 2017.
“The Birth of African American Literature”. Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 2016.
“Carver’s Food Movement”. In The Common Reader, May 8, 2015.
“Elegy and Remembrance in the Cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis”, MELUS Winter 2013.
“1778: The Manumission of Phillis Wheatley”. In A New Literary History of America, edited by Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus. Harvard University Press, September 2009. Paperback edition: 2012.
“Teamoh and Douglass: Anxieties of Influence in the postbellum slave narrative”. Commonplace (January 2009).
“Back Talk: Of Print and Primogeniture, or, the Curse of Firsts”, African American Review (40) Spring 2007.
“Recipes for Respect: Black Hospitality Entrepreneurs Before World War I”, in Anne Bower, ed. African American Foodways, University of Illinois Press, 2007.