Kesla Elmore

Professional Bio

Kesla Elmore is a dual-title Ph.D. Candidate in English and Africana Studies. She is a scholar, educator, and dedicated community leader whose research focuses on 20th and 21st century African American literature, Black girlhood, print culture, the great migration, media, digital humanities, and popular culture studies. Elmore has a commitment to community education, accessibility, and mentorship through the creation of inclusive and collaborative pedagogy and scholarship. Elmore currently teaches across college and K-12 classrooms.

Elmore served as a #DigBlk fellow in the Center for Black Digital Research from 2021 - 2025, contributing to both the Black Women's Organizing Archive (BWOA) and the Colored Conventions Project (CCP). During her time with BWOA, she served as co-chair of Digitize Black Women's Records Day 2024, which was a public facing event to celebrate digitization efforts of Black women's archival papers in select repositories across the country. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Milton B. Dolinger Graduate Fellowship in Writing. Elmore was also a 2020 Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring program fellow.

You can find her most recent publication here - Review: Linking Lost Jazz Shrines, Reviews In Digital Humanities