Dr. Jacqueline Wood holds a Ph.D. from University of Florida. She specializes in twentieth century African American literature with an emphasis on African American women dramatists. As an Associate Professor in Black Studies and the Department of English at UMKC, she teaches African American literature survey courses, African American Drama, and African American Poetry. In addition, she has taught courses on early American immigrant experience, women writers of color, and composition and culture. Her scholarship addresses resistant rhetoric in late twentieth century African American women’s drama, and, most recently, the foundational role that Sonia Sanchez has played in informing these black women dramatists’ voices. Dr. Wood has published articles on contemporary black women dramatists Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks in journals such as Studies in the Humanities and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, as well as College Literature, The African American Review, and The College Language Association Journal. She recently published an edited collection of Sonia Sanchez’s plays, Power Plays: The Dramatic Works of Sonia Sanchez, with Duke University Press. She currently editing The Sonia Sanchez Reader, to be published also with Duke University Press.