Delali Kumavie is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. Prior to coming to Syracuse, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Institute at Harvard University, and a predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Black Aerial Imagination: Aviation and Flight in African and Diasporic Literature (Columbia UP, 2026) which examines how aviation and flight have shaped Black lives and the global Black cultural imagination. Considering works by African and diasporic writers such as Kofi Anyidoho, Toni Morrison, and Abdulrazak Gurnah, she argues that representations of aviation and air travel reveal the structures circumscribing Black existence.