Vallaire Wallace is a Ph.D Candidate in the English Department. She completed her undergraduate studies at Queens College, CUNY where she wrote her Mellon Mays Undergraduate Thesis on the unspoken history of Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston's posthumous  biography of the last known survivor of the Middle Passage. Her dissertation, written under the direction of Marlon B. Ross, is tentatively titled "Towards Elsewhere: Black Queer Literature and the Politics of Movement" and focuses on travel, life writing and its relation to black queer subjectivity, attending to the ways movement ruptures our understanding of connection for black queer people through the twentieth and twenty-first century. Her project is supported with the Mellon Mays Foundation, as a continuing Mellon Mays Fellow. Her work is also published with DIO Press and Electric Literature. When she is not writing her dissertation or doing work as a Managerial Editor for Humanity with University of Pennsylvania Press, she is either cooking, playing video games, or bothering her friends and family.