Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in 20th-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. He earned his A.B. in English from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in literature from Duke University. At Princeton, Nishikawa teaches courses on African American humor, African American authors (James Baldwin), and Afro-Asian studies.

Nishikawa’s first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His major work in progress is “Black Paratext,” a study of how book design has influenced the production and reception of African American literature from World War II to the present. Nishikawa has published widely on modern African American print culture, with a particular emphasis on newspapers, magazines, and independent publishers.

Recent publications include an essay on black experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley in American Literary History (2018) and an article on Black Arts movement editor Hoyt W. Fuller in Chicago Review (2016). Nishikawa has also contributed chapters to the forthcoming collections Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights (Illinois), African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture (Wisconsin), and Are You Entertained? New Essays on Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Duke).