is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Folklore at Georgia State University who hails from Natchez, MS. She obtained a B.A. in English from Alcorn State University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on Black women’s comedy and humor, Black speculative fiction, and African American folklore/oral traditions, and she regularly teaches courses related to these interests including African American folklore and Afrofuturism. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Folklife Magazine, Western Folklore, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism. Dr. Bailey has presented widely at academic and professional conferences, given keynote addresses on a variety of subjects, and she has served on the executive committees of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and the College Language Association. She edited Conversations with Kiese Laymon, forthcoming with University Press of Mississippi, and she is a contributing co-editor to Get It While It’s Hot: Gas Station and Convenience Food in the U.S. South, which is under contract with LSU Press. She is also co-editing The No Limit Reader: Music, Place, and Space in the Dirty South, and she is currently working on her first manuscript-The Black Folktastic: Black Speculation and the Sankofa Aesthetic.