Rebecca Black is a writer and educator. Her current manuscript, a detective memoir, explores inheritance, disinheritance, and the authorship controversies surrounding the Christmas song “Jingle Bell Rock,” which was copyrighted in 1957 by a cousin of her grandfather’s.
Originally from Albany, Georgia, she lives in Albany, California, where she served a double term as Poet Laureate, curating a monthly poetry reading series at the Albany Library and designing and implementing an annual community-wide public art project: “Fall into Haiku.”
From 2004-2010, she was a lecturer at SCU, teaching a range of courses in the English Department. Her courses received Irvine Foundation and SCU sustainability grants. Her writing from this period won NEA and Wallace Stegner fellowships.
Her book of poems, “Cottonlandia,” received a 2004 Juniper Prize. Poems in “Cottonlandia” explore what poet Claudia Rankine terms the “racial imaginary,” seeking to make plain the limits of her own white self-knowledge and the complex legacy of “good white Southern moderates” in her family. Black’s poems almost always return to a question posed by philosopher Gerald Bruns: what do we do with what has come down to us from the past?
In 2011, she was a Fulbright Teaching Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her teaching and research there focused on the pressure of political statement in poetry by Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson. From 2010-2014, she was a member of the MFA faculty at UNC Greensboro, where she taught graduate poetry and poetics workshops as well as undergraduate literature classes.
She’s interested in narrative nonfiction, ideas of autofiction, fictional techniques in nonfiction, longform journalism, and contemporary poetry. She holds an M.F.A. from Indiana University (2002) and a B.A. in Art History and English from Tulane University (1997).
In her free time, she enjoys backpacking in the Sierras and cooking with her two sons.