Darieck B. Scott

Biography

Darieck Scott earned his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and an M.A. in African American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. Before coming to UC Berkeley he taught in the English departments of the University of Texas at Austin, and UC Santa Barbara. His teaching and research interests include: 20th and 21st century African American literature; creative writing; queer theory, and LGBTQ studies; race, gender and sexuality in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books.

Publications

Scott is the author of Keeping it Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press 2022). Keeping it Unreal won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies and was a Locus Award Finalist for nonfiction. Scott’s book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010) won the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies. Scott co-edited a special issue of American Literature, “Queer About Comics,” which was named the Best Special Issue of 2018 by the MLA’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex (2007) and Traitor to the Race (1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (2005), Black Like Us (2002), Giant Steps (2000), Shade(1996) and Ancestral House (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (1997) and Inside Him (2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, and The Americas Review.