Derrick Harriell is the Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Stripper in Wonderland (LSU Press, 2017), Cotton (Aquarius Press-Willow Books 2010), and Ropes (Aquarius Press, 2014). He is the winner of the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Book Award. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.