Dr. Kami Fletcher started her
educational career in the city where
she was born and raised –Pine Bluff,
Arkansas. She received her BA in
English from the University of
Arkansas at Pine Bluff in 2001. She
went on to receive two Master’s
degrees - her MPA from the University
of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2003 and
her MA in Women’s Studies from Texas
Woman’s University in 2006. And it is
in the state of Maryland, where she
now resides with her life mate, Dr.
Myron Strong, and their three sons,
that in 2013 Dr. Fletcherreceived her
Ph.D. in History from Morgan State
University. At present, Dr. Fletcher
is an Associate Professor of American
& African American History and
Co-Coordinator of Women’s and Gender
Studies at Albright College. She
teaches courses that explores the
African experience in America and
unpacks social and cultural U.S.
history at the intersections of race,
gender, class, and sexuality. She is
also the President of the Collective
for Radical Death Studies, a
non-profit organization whose mission
it is to decolonize Death Studies and
center BIPOC voices in death work. Her
research centers on African American
burial grounds, late 19 th /early 20
th century Black female and male
undertakers, and contemporary Black
grief and mourning. She is the
co-editor of Till Death Do Us Part:
American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders
Uncrossed (University Press of
Mississippi, 2020) and Grave History:
Death, Race & Gender in Southern
Cemeteries from Antebellum to the
Post-Civil Rights Era (University of
Georgia Press, forthcoming 2023). She
has also authored articles and essays,
which include the following: “Are
Enslaved African Americans Buried at
Mount Harmon Plantation? Space and
Reflection for National Mourning and
Memorializing” ; “Real Business:
Maryland’s First Black Cemetery
Journey’s into the Enterprise of
Death, 1807-1920” ; “Long Live Chill
#LLC: Exploring Grief, Memorial &
Ritual in African American R.I.P.
T-shirt Culture”. Currently, Dr.
Fletcher is working on the “Culture
Keeper’s” Oral History Project funded
by theNational Science Foundation in
collaboration with George Washington
University. The project asks African
American funeral service works, the
nation's culture keepers,
how rituals have been recreated,
disrupted, reconceptualized, abandoned
and sustained during the pandemic. For
more on Dr. Fletcher visit her
website: www.kamifletcher.com.