Presented in partnership with Urbana Arts + Culture Program.

Kimberly Mack is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her recent book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, is part of Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 book series. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award and was a finalist for the 2022 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie First Book Award. Kimberly is writing another book, tentatively titled The Untold History of American Rock Criticism, about the BIPoC and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. For this project, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a senior scholar research grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Charles Hamm Fellowship from the Society for American Music. Kimberly holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is a memoirist and music writer, and her public-facing and scholarly articles and essays have appeared in Longreads, No Depression, Hot Press, PopMatters, Relix, African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere.