Hayley Wilson is a fifth-year PhD candidate in English literature, criticism, and textual studies with an emphasis on African, African American, and Diaspora literature. Her current dissertation research focuses on the dramatists of the New Negro Renaissance, formerly known as the Harlem Renaissance, and includes plays from well-known African American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Through incorporating the perspectives of African and Caribbean dramatists, writers, and theorists such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Frantz Fanon, she traces how the inclusion of African ritual performance retentions, both secular and spiritual, inform and complicate the myriad ways that these playwrights, as persons in diaspora, create and sustain literary connections to Africa. Hayley’s work also includes the study of race and culture in more modern works, and her article, “‘A Leasing of Bodies:’ Race, Medicine, and Radical Care in Jamie Lloyd’s 2023 Revival of The Effect,” is forthcoming in Modern Drama.