Dr. Stallings received her Ph.D in English from Michigan State University. She is the author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life (Indiana UP, 2021): A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (University of California Press, 2020); Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2015); Mutha’ is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2007).
A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South was a John Hope Franklin Prize Finalist 2021, American Studies Association.
Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the MLA GL/Q Caucus, the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Studies Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and it was a 2016 Finalist for the 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Studies.
She is co-editor and contributing author to Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019) and Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines (2011). She has also published essays in African American Review, South-Atlantic Quarterly, GLQ, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Bisexuality, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Black Camera, Obsidian III, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, CR: The New Centennial Review, Western Journal of Black Studies, Feminist Formations, MELUS, and numerous edited collections.