Dr. Justin Gifford is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. His areas of research and teaching are nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literature, with a focus on popular culture. His book, "PImping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing," provides the first literary and cultural history of black crime writing and the marketplace that supported it. Through a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks by Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines and others, Gifford explores the history of African American crime literature from the era of the Black Power Movement to age of hip hop.