Office Hours

Monday, Wednesday, Friday 1:20 - 2:20 p.m. and by appointment

Get to know Darius

Darius Stewart is a writer, scholar, and educator whose work explores Black queer identity, the history and evolving practices of the essay, and the Black autobiographical tradition, particularly as these intersect in hybrid forms of life writing concerned with memory, illness, embodiment, and erotic legibility.

He is the author of Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing, 2024) and Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems (EastOver Press, 2022), along with three earlier poetry chapbooks. Be Not Afraid of My Body was named a Stonewall Book Award–Israel Fishman Nonfiction Honoree and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and his essays and poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Callaloo, and elsewhere, and he has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, among other awards.

Stewart earned his PhD in English from the University of Iowa, where he also completed an MFA in nonfiction and a Certificate in African American Studies. He holds an additional MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

His teaching spans African American literature, memoir, forms of the essay, Black queer studies, and transgressive literatures, grounded in a commitment to anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive classroom practices.