Justin Gifford(III)
Dr. Justin Gifford is a Professor of English Literature at the
University of Nevada, Reno. His areas of research and teaching are
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American
literature, with a focus on popular culture. His book, "PImping
Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of
Black Pulp Publishing," provides the first literary and cultural
history of black crime writing and the marketplace that supported it.
Through a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks by
Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines and others, Gifford explores
the history of African American crime literature from the era of the
Black Power Movement to age of hip hop.