Trudier Harris earned a B.A. from Stillman College (1969) and an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1973) from The Ohio State University, Columbus, before holding positions at The College of William & Mary, Emory University, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Alabama. She is University Distinguished Research Professor of English Emerita, the University of Alabama, and J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, UNC Chapel Hill, where she taught courses in African American literature and folklore. Her published books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009), Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014), Depictions of Home in African American Literature (2021), Bigger: A Literary Life (2024), and a memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003). In 2002, she received the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for selection as Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar. Stillman College bestowed an honorary doctorate degree upon her in 2010. UNC Chapel Hill created the “Trudier Harris Distinguished Professorship” in her honor in 2014. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate degree from The College of William & Mary, the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literary Studies, and a Resident Fellowship to the National Humanities Center. 

Harris received the 2018 Clarence E. Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing from the College of Communication & Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. She also won the 2018 SEC Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Alabama (“Professor of the Year”). Throughout her career, Harris has traveled and lectured throughout the United States and the world, having visited 46 states and 21 countries. On 10 March 2023, Harris was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, where she joins the likes of Truman Capote, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Margaret Walker.

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