Alanna PrinceN.E.H. Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics

Alanna Prince received her PhD in English from Northeastern University in 2024.

Prince specializes in contemporary poetry, life-writing, and visual culture with a focus on how Black women use these forms to engage with the history of chattel slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas. Her work is grounded in Black feminism, postcolonial theory, and archival studies. Drawing on writer and critic Dionne Brand’s notion of poetry as a counter-narrative, Prince examines how Black women artists and writers create “records of possible time” through poetic and narrative interventions that retell and reckon with the archive of enslavement and how the previous habits of the archive have constructed our present moment.

Her developing book project, De/Reconstruct Politics: Black Feminist Building, imagines what comes next by surfacing the historical foundations of contemporary social, political, and environmental destruction alongside how Black feminist writers are imagining a future that frees these entities from injustice, hierarchy, and borders.