Justin Gifford

Justin Gifford, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he specializes in American and African American literature. With a master’s from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from the University of Virginia, he has been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and American Book Review and is recognized as an authority on such authors as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, the first literary and cultural history of Black street fiction, was a finalist for both the Edgar Allan Poe Award for literary criticism and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award for scholarship. Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim has been optioned by Anonymous Content to be developed into a limited series.