Naomi Extra is a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In both her creative and scholarly work, she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. Her primary research interests include: black feminisms, African American literature, black music, comics/graphic novels, and black sexual politics.
Her current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positive Feminism, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the African American Intellectual History Society. Her chapbook, Ratchet Supreme, was selected by poet Tiana Clark as the winner of the 2019 BOAAT Chapbook Prize.
In addition to her creative and academic work, Dr. Extra is committed to public scholarship and community engagement. Her public facing work has appeared in places like Boston Review, Zora, Glamour, Lit Hub, Washington Post’s The Lily, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. She is the founder of the Black Women in Jazz Oral History Project, a project that seeks to redefine how we think about community, labor, and artistic production in jazz.
Courses
- 01:014:130 African American Literature
- 01:014:206 The Black Woman- Fall 2025