Kierra C. Duncan

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kierra C. Duncan (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University, where she also holds a graduate certificate in African American Studies. She received her BA in English from UCLA, and AA from Los Angeles Mission College. Her research and teaching is driven by the desire to explore the expressive forms created by Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean subjects in their pursuits for freedom.

Kierra is a bibliographer, avid book collector, and aspiring curator of archival materials concerned with the Black Atlantic world. She is currently at work on a bibliographic project "The Plantation in the Americas, 1802-1930," as well as developing the book collections "Afro-Anthologies" and "Translating Blackness Across the Atlantic." Kierra was a curatorial and archival assistant for Firestone Library's exhibition "Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory" (2023). She also co-curated the public archival exhibition "The Poetics of Propagation" (2026) at the Princeton Public Library, producing a creative non-fiction zine by the same name.

This work is all deeply personal. It is rooted in the desire to generate counter-archives of freedom that have the power to disrupt institutionalized archives of gendered, racialized violence.

Portrait by Wren Rene
Website by Jep Alaba

The Plantation in the Americas, 1802-1930 updates and expands Edgar T. Thompson's The Plantation: An International Bibliography (1983). It provides librarians, students, and scholars with primary and secondary sources related to plantation cultures in the U.S., Caribbean, and South America, including sources on the plantation system's Mediterranean origins. Primary sources include a wide range of published and unpublished materials, including guides to archival collections, visual art, and literature.

Keystone View Company. “We's done all dis, 's mornin',” copyright 1899 by B.L. Singley. Stereograph, 3.3 x 7 in. Collection of the author.

Keystone View Company. “Gathering bananas in the Famous Cedar Grove Plantation, Jamaica,” copyright 1906 by Underwood & Underwood. Stereograph, 3.3 x 7 in. Collection of the author.

Afro-Anthologies gathers select anthologies of African, Caribbean, and Afro-American literature published between 1914 and 1989. Editors of these collections are united by a common purpose: to leave a record of Black authorship for future generations to use as foundations for new national literatures. The collection received an honorable mention by the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize (2023).

Makward, Edris and Leslie Lacy, editors. *Contemporary African Literature*. New York: Random House, 1972. First edition. Collection of the author.

—. *Contemporary African Literature: Teacher’s Manual*. New York: Random House, 1972. First edition. Collection of the author.

Cromwell, Otelia, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Eva Dykes, editors. *Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges with a Bibliography of Negro Literature*. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. First edition. Collection of the author.

Hendriks, A.L. and Cedric Lindo, editors. *The Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature*. Jamaica: The Arts Celebration Committee of the Ministry of Development and Welfare, 1962. First edition. Collection of the author.

Ramchand, Kenneth, editor. *West Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology*. Nelson Caribbean, 1966. First edition. Collection of the author.

Berrian, Brenda F. and Aart Broek, editors. *Bibliography of Women Writers From the Caribbean (1831-1986)*. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1989. First edition. Collection of the author.

Translating Blackness Across the Atlantic is a collection of twentieth-century novels published in the US, UK, and anglophone Caribbean by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American authors. The collection traces alterations made by publishers to the novel's original paratext so that it may be understood by a different national audience. It originated from several British reviews of Song of Solomon, which deemed Toni Morrison's "black language" inaccessible to British readers. The collection won the California Young Collector's Book Prize (2025) and was the subject of the interview On Multiple Editions of Black Diasporic Writers (2026).

Hale, Shelia. "Ten American Women Writers." *Harpers & Queen Magazine*. London: National Magazine Co., July 1978. Collection of the author.

Petry, Ann. *The Street*. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946. First edition. Collection of the author.

Petry, Ann. *The Street*. London: Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1947. First English edition. Collection of the author.

Wynter, Sylvia. *The Hills of Hebron*. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. First edition. Collection of the author.

Wynter, Sylvia. *The Hills of Hebron: A Jamaican Novel*. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. First American edition. Collection of the author.

Toni Morrison: The Sites of Memory (2023) was a public exhibition of the Toni Morrison Papers held at Firestone Library. It was a curatorial project led by Autumn Womack (Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton). Kierra was on the curatorial team with Rene Boatman (bibliographer, assistant to Toni Morrison, and Technical Administrative Assistant in Special Collections) and Andrew Schlager (Postdoctoral Fellow in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago).

Kierra was responsible for curating the correspondence, as well as the research materials and manuscripts of the historical novel Jazz (1992). Her selections from the correspondence were the foundation for "Part 5: Genealogies of Black Feminism." For Jazz, she identified the 1926 newspaper articles from The Amsterdam News that Morrison reworked in the novel to refute the widespread myth that Black women were passive victims. Kierra also discovered "book voice," a modernist style of narration Morrison invented for the novel.

Kierra and Andrew's co-written essay about Morrison's unique approach to revision is forthcoming in the volume The Sites of Memory (Princeton University Press), edited by Womack and Kinohi Nishikawa (Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton).

Morrison, Toni. *Jazz*. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. First edition. Collection of the author.

When reading *The New York Amsterdam News*, located in the research materials for *Jazz*, Kierra discovered that Morrison circled the columns “Men Who Attacked Girl To Be Heard Tomorrow” and “Woman Says Man Beat Her” in red pen. Kierra later identified that Morrison rewrote this violence committed against Black women in the novel on pp. 74. In *Jazz*, Black women were no longer passive victims of patriarchal violence but armed defenders of their own bodies.

The Poetics of Propagation (2026) was a public archival exhibition co-curated by Kierra and Nicole-Ann Lobo (PhD Candidate in Art & Archaeology and Interdisciplinary Humanities). Attendees were introduced to (post)colonial archives located in coastal-nations through various materials, including photography, postcards, prints, and books, that could be found in institutional archives across Jamaica and Goa. They were invited to question and discuss the impact of man-made and natural disasters on efforts to preserve materials located in the Global South.

The exhibition was coupled with the launch of the co-written zine Poetics of Propagation. The creative non-fiction essays were a medium for Kierra and Nicole-Ann to meditate on their respective experiences conducting research on deteriorating materials in Jamaica (Kierra) and Goa (Nicole-Ann). Inspired by Kierra's time spent propagating plants, the pair decided to offer up archival propagation: the choice to approach fragments from the archive as clippings that can be replanted, regrown, and redistributed to their communities.

Zines were distributed to event attendees. If interested, Kierra can be contacted via email (kierrad@princeton.edu) for a PDF.