Kimberly Mack

About Kimberly Mack

Kimberly Mack is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she specializes in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethnic American literature, autobiographical narratives, and American popular music. Her 33 1/3 book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, was published by Bloomsbury in May 2023. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award. Kimberly is writing another book, The Untold History of American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s.

Kimberly is also a memoirist and music writer, and her scholarly and public-facing articles and essays have appeared in African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, AMP: American Music Perspectives, Longreads, No Depression, and elsewhere. Kimberly holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.