Francesca T. Royster

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University and received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley in 1995. At DePaul she teaches courses on African American Literature, Queer Writers of Color and Writing About Music. She’s written creative and scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black country music performers and fans, Prince, Beyoncé, Tracy Chapman, queer utopias and chosen family, among other topics. Her books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/ Overlook Press, 2023). Among her awards, Black Country Music won the 2023 Ralph Gleason Music Books First Prize from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the 2023 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research​, the 2023 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, from The American Musicological Society and the 2023 Woody Guthrie Award for most Outstanding Book on Popular Music by the International Association of Popular Music Studies- US.