Bio
Dr. Randi Gray Kristensen earned her doctorate in English in 2000 from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her dissertation, Rights of Passage: A Cross-Cultural Study of Maroon Novels by Black Women Writers, investigates the use and implications of marronage, the African-American practice of self-emancipation to forge alternative New World communities, in novels by Black women writers of the Caribbean and the United States.
Currently, Randi is Deputy Director of Writing in the Disciplines, at the University Writing Program at the George Washington University, where she also teaches in the Africana and Women’s Studies programs. She co-edits the Pedagogy/Activism/Cultural Studies series at Lexington Books. She also holds an M.F.A. in fiction, and has recent work in Caribbean Erotic and Electric Grace: More Writing by Washington Area Women Writers. She is getting back into event production, and recently hosted a screening of “The Legend of ‘Cool Disco Dan'” at George Washington University to bring together university and community audiences to talk about the District of Columbia and its contested histories. Both her academic and creative work address the perspectives and possibilities of the margin and the edge, and the structures that define and are sometimes overthrown from and by those positions.