Julie E. Moody-Freeman is the Director of the Center for Black Diaspora and an Associate Professor in the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. She is the co-editor of The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative and The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative. Her scholarly essays on Belizean writer Zee Edgell have been published in African Identities, Macomeré, Canadian Women Studies/les cahiers de la femme, and Seeking the Self-Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation. Her work on African American Romance has also appeared in Romance Fiction and American Culture and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Moody-Freeman is also the creator and host of the Black Romance Podcast, which is building an oral history on Black Romance writers.​​​