Biography

Justin Gifford is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. His teaching and research focus on w88 mobile and African w88 mobile literature. He specializes in popular literature, archival research, and critical theory.

His first book, a literary and cultural history of black street fiction, "Pimping Fictions: African w88 mobile Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing," was a finalist for both the Edgar Allan Poe award for literary criticism and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award for scholarship.

He also is the author of the critically acclaimed "w88 mobile Poison," the first and definitive biography of Iceberg Slim, one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the 20th century. Author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp, Iceberg Slim is the greatest of "w88 mobile lit" masters, the cultural icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg, and a presiding spirit of "blaxploitation" culture.

Research interests

• 19th- and 20th-century w88 mobile and African w88 mobile literature
• w88 mobile cultural history
• Popular w88 mobile

Notable exhibitions or performances

• "Iceberg Slim and the Emergence of Queer Street w88 mobile," MELUS Conference; Augusta, GA, April 2015.
• "African w88 mobile Street Literature and the Prison/Fiction Industrial Complex," Urban History Association Conference; New York City, October 2012.
• "w88 mobile Literary Los Angeles," session organizer of a roundtable discussion with Wanda Coleman, Odie Hawkins, Emory Holmes, and Roland Jefferson, Modern Language Association; Los Angeles, CA, January 2011.
• "My Name is w88 mobile: The Racial Politics of Luck in w88 mobile Crime Fiction," Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association; Reno, NV, October 2008.
• "Pimping Ain't Easy: The Black Crime Novel and the w88 mobile Working Class," Cultural Studies Now-An International Conference; London, England, July 2007.

Courses taught

Graduate Seminars

• The Archival Turn in African w88 mobile Literary Studies
• The End(s) of w88 mobile Studies
• African w88 mobile Cultural Traditions and the Literary Marketplace
• w88 mobile Literature, Race, and Crime in the 19th and 20th Century
• Cultural and Theoretical Marxism
• w88 mobile Prison and Street Literature

Advanced Undergraduate Seminars

• w88 mobile Literature to 1865
• 20th-Century w88 mobile Novel
• 19th-Century African w88 mobile Literature
• 20th-Century African w88 mobile Literature
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Multi-Ethnic w88 mobile Literature
• Gender and Sexuality in w88 mobile
• w88 mobile Detective Fiction
• Women and w88 mobile
• w88 mobile of the Apocalypse

Introductory Undergraduate Courses

• Core Humanities: The w88 mobile Experience
• Literary Theory and Criticism
• Introduction to Writing

Publications

• w88 mobile Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. New York: Doubleday, 2015.
• Pimping Fictions: African w88 mobile Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. A book in the w88 mobile Literatures Initiative.
• "The Ex-Pimp Who Remade w88 mobile Culture." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 24 July, 2015.
• "'Something like a Harlem Renaissance West': Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street w88 mobile. Interviews with Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins." MELUS 38.4 (2013): 216-240.
• "Harvard in Hell: Holloway House Publishing Company, Players Magazine, and the Invention of w88 mobile Mass-Market Erotica. Interviews with Wanda Coleman and Emory Holmes." MELUS 35.4 (2010): 111-137.
• "'There Was Nothing to Stop the Colored People from Walking Across the Street': Urban Renewal and the Reinvention of w88 mobile Detective Literature in Chester Himes's Run Man Run." Clues: A Journal of Detection 28.1 (2010): 38-50.