Zetta Elliott

Visiting Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies

Specialization
Representations of racial violence and trauma; black feminist theory; motifs of excision in women’s writing from the African Diaspora

Zetta Elliott is a black feminist writer and cultural critic. Born in Canada, Elliott has spent the past twelve years writing, teaching, and studying in the United States. She won the 2005 Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest for her story, “Bird,” which will be published as a children’s picture book in 2008.

Elliott's first play, Nothing but a Woman, was a finalist in the Chicago Dramatists’ Many Voices Project, and was staged in the city of Chicago in July 2006. Nothing but a Woman chronicles the relationship between two sisters, Geneva and Grace. Bound together by the premature death of their parents, the two women's devotion is tested when they begin to compete for the same man. She is currently working on her third full-length play, The Letters, which takes place on the campus of a New England women’s college, and features three generations of black women scholars. 

At Mount Holyoke, Elliott teaches Introduction to African American & African Studies; Gender, Terror, & Trauma in African American Culture;Black Women Writers: Feminist Visions from the African Diaspora; and Black Masculinities: The Performance of Gender in African American Culture.

News Link:

"MHC's Cool New Courses," Office of Communications, August 9, 2007