Trudier Harris is University Distinguished Research Professor of English Emerita at the University of Alabama and J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at UNC Chapel Hill, where she taught courses in African American literature and folklore. Among her 25 published books are "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), and "Depictions of Home in African American Literature" (2021).

She published her memoir, "Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South," in 2003. In 2002, she received the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for selection as Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created the “Trudier Harris Distinguished Professorship” in her honor in 2014. In 2018, she received an honorary degree from The College of William and Mary, the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literary Studies, and a Resident Fellowship to the National Humanities Center. 

She 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 (a “Professor of Year” designation). On March 10, 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. Her latest book, "Bigger Thomas: A Literary Life," is forthcoming in 2024.