Dr. Misti Nicole Harper graduated from the University of Arkansas in 2017 and is the assistant professor of African American History at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she joined the Department in 2021. She previously served as the visiting assistant professor of African American and women’s history at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. She worked as the historical consultant for Focus on the Women’s Suffrage Movement, part of the Read Woke Books children’s educational series. Harper’s forthcoming monograph, Ladies of Little Rock: Black Femininity and Respectability Politics in the Fight to Desegregate Central High School (University of Georgia Press, 2024) explores the activism and visibility of middle-class Black women during that 1957 school desegregation effort. Crossing the Deep River: An Introduction to African American History is her first textbook.