Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at IU-Bloomington and her scholarship examines how Black lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Her research interests include Black lesbian literary history, LGBTQ representation in the South, ethnography, Black feminism, sexual citizenship, lesbian print culture, writing communities, and popular culture.

Her current project “Marginal and Forbidden”: Black Lesbians, Contemporary American Culture, and the Politics of Representation, examines Black lesbian literature and film from 1972-2012 and argues that Black lesbian literature and other cultural artifacts mirror Black lesbians’ social, political, and cultural statuses, in that they are marginalized and often excluded from both Black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. She contends that Black lesbian cultural texts have two main goals: 1) to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; and 2) to challenge the notion that the claiming of a Black lesbian identity is “marginal and forbidden.”

Dr. Allen is also Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and co-directs a literary non-profit for Black women writers. Her creative work can be found in Lez Talk: A Collection of Black Lesbian Short Fiction, Sinister Wisdom, and in her debut collection of short stories and essays, A Failure to Communicate. She co-edited Solace: Writing, Refuge, and LGBTQ Women of Color, and Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing. She is a Hurston/Wright Foundation Workshop Alum, and 2019 Kimbilio Fellow (deferred). Stephanie is currently working on a collection of Black speculative short fiction and her first novel.