Landy Watley is a doctoral candidate at Howard University focusing on contemporary African American literature, African American hip-hop rhetoric and culture, and visual and literary representations of the black female body. In addition to her graduate studies and research, Watley has served as a Communications professor for the The Summer Health Professionals Program at Howard University. In 2018, she served on the conference advisory board for the Rhetoric and Composition HBCU Symposium as well as worked as Guest Editor for the Rhetoric and Composition HBCU Symposium Blog in partnership with MacMillan Publishing. Watley was recently award an internship with the National Endowment for the Humanities and announced as a 2019 recipient of the Scholars for the Dream Award sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She is also a featured speaker at the 2019 South by Southwest Festival where she will be speaking on the panel “Where are the Blaccents in Podcast Culture?” Watley is also a member of a host of university and professional organizations including DBLAC, Digital Black Lit (Literatures & Literacies) and co-president of the Graduate English Student Association at Howard.