Victoria Moten

Victoria is a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Department of English. She is a  doctoral candidate in the English Department at Howard University with a major focus in African  American Literature and a minor focus in Ecocriticism. She received her M.A. in Language in  Literature at Clark Atlanta University completing her thesis on the works of James Baldwin. Her  dissertation work engages with Afrofuturist ecological theory and praxis as she examines the  Solarpunk Afrofuturist prose of authors like Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin and Karen Lord. She’s  presented on panels at the National Council for Black Studies, College English Association, and  the American University in Paris James Baldwin Conference on these subjects. She has also  researched environmental and cultural sustainability in India as a Fulbright scholar. Her writing on this subject can be found in Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts(Routledge 2024). A Hurston/Wright Fellow, her creative writing ranges from poetry to short  fiction; from biographical to speculative, and can be found in the Obsidian, Maryland Bards  Poetry Review and Black Freighter Press. She has also served as senior researcher for Buried  Blueprints of Black Education: Reconstruction to Deconstruction through Digital Storytelling,  NEH Humanities Initiatives for HBCUs as well as a co-investigator for the Black Lit Digital  Humanities Project, and the University of Maryland’s Study of Writing. She has also served as a  content developer for Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History &  Culture’s North Star Outreach Program, and as co-curator for exhibit, “The Age of Cane:  Recipes for Reclamation”, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.