Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities and Chair of English at Pomona College. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007); Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2012); two poetry collections, Vixen (2017) and Grimoire (2020), and the editor of A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2015).