[Kimberly Mack]

Dear All–My name is Kimberly Mack, and I am running to serve on the executive committee of the GS Life Writing forum. I would like to share a little bit about my work and, if elected, what I would hope to contribute to the GS Life Writing Forum over the next few years. I am very excited about this opportunity, and I look forward to getting to know other members of this group! I hold a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and I am Associate Professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. My first book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, about fictionalized autobiographical self-fashioning in American blues literature and popular music, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2020. I am currently writing my second book, The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPoC and white women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. My in-progress book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, is about the Black rock band Living Colour’s sophomore effort Time’s Up.  My scholarly articles have appeared in Popular Music and Society and Journal of Popular Music Studies, and I have a forthcoming chapter about writer Ralph Ellison and the blues in Cambridge University Press’s Ralph Ellison in Context. I am also a music critic/journalist and memoirist whose work has appeared in Longreads, Music Connection, Relix, No Depression, PopMatters, and Hot Press. If elected, I would look forward to participating actively in the Life Writing forum panels at future MLA meetings, and I would be delighted to help plan some of them. I am particularly interested in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to curating future panels, putting book-based autobiographical narratives into conversation with life writing as expressed through music, visual art, film, theatre, and dance.  To vote, please log in to the MLA website. If you have any questions or comments about my statement, please feel free to contact me via this forum or by email: kimberly.mack@utoledo.edu. Thank you for your consideration!  

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