Dr. Herman Beavers is the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He teaches courses in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature and Poetry Writing. He is the author of two scholarly monographs, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James A. McPherson (1995) and Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including, The Langston Hughes Colloquy, The American Arts Quarterly, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Black American Literature Forum, among others. His  work is anthologized in Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty- First Century, Who Speaks for America, Show Us Your Papers, and Gathering Darkness: A Cave Canem Reader. He is the author of three chapbooks, A Neighborhood of Feeling, Obsidian Blues, and The Vernell Poems. He is completing a full-length volume of poems, Even in Such Light.