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Historian, essayist, and nonfiction writer, Dr. Khary Oronde Polk joined us for Episode 3 of Season Two of Black Writers Read.  An Associate Professor of Black Studies & Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, Dr. Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 published by University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Contagions of Empire examines how the movement of Black soldiers and nurses around the world in the early-to-mid twentieth century challenged U.S. military ideals of race, nation, sexuality and honor.

Polk has written for the Studio Museum of Harlem, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, The Journal of Negro History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gawker, and the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. He has also contributed essays to a number of queer of color anthologies, including If We Have To Take Tomorrow, Corpus, and Think Again. Polk is a member of the African Atlantic Research Group, the Critical Militarization Editorial Collective, and recently held a visiting professorship at the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.  During this episode, Dr. Polk read from his new essay/project, "Spacewalking in the Archive: Transatlantic Black Feminist Lives" To read the essay in its entirety, please visit: https://www.interimpoetics.org/384/khary-oronde-polk/. 

Find Dr. Khary Oronde Polk on Twitter: @kharypolk. 

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