Professor Tara T. Green has degrees in English from Louisiana State University (M.A., Ph.D) and Dillard University (BA) and has taught at universities in Louisiana and Arizona. She is the Linda Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Professor and Former Director (2008-2016) of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Her areas of research include, Black gender studies, African American autobiographies and fiction (late nineteenth through contemporary), African women's literature, African American parent-child relationships, and African Americans in the South. Believing that research should explore major issues of the day, she considers how literature reflects current social and political concerns. Her most recent book, Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song provides an interdisciplinary perspective on African descendants' resistance to social death during the Middle Passage and in spaces symbolic of the Middle Passage (Ohio State UP, April 27, 2018). Her book A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (winner of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies), focuses on the impact of fatherlessness from the perspectives of Barack Obama and other Black men. She is also the editor of two books, From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature — a look at the literary history that records ways in which African Americans have been confined and Presenting Oprah Winfrey, Her Films, and African American Literature — a study of Winfrey's role as a producer and/or actress.   Inspired by her upbringing in the New Orleans area, she is completing a book manuscript on New Orleans writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Professor Green has presented her work throughout the United States and in Africa, England, and the Caribbean as well as presentations to local schools and community, religious, and professional organizations. Moving beyond the classroom, she has received recognition for her work as a mentor. She is an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Past President of the Langston Hughes Society,  co-editor of Mercer University Press's Voices of the African Diaspora Series, a voting rights activist, and political news junkie.