Cherry Muhanji
    is a native of Detroit, Michigan.  An accomplished writer and teacher, Muhanji has
    won important literary awards for her work, including the Lambda New Fiction award
    for her novel Her, and the Before Columbus Book Award for Tight Spaces, an
    anthology of short stories that portray life in America for Black women.  She earned
    her Ph. D. in English, anthropology, and African American World Studies from the
    University of Iowa. She recently retired as a faculty member of Portland University,
    Portland, Oregon.

    Dr. Muhanji argues jazz as metaphor, where this uniquely American art form
    represents the democratic ideals wherein the collective--in traditional jazz the horn,
    drum, bass, and piano--plays together, solos, and then returns as a collective. This
    democratic ideal inherent in this art form is that everyone gets to solo and everyone
    plays together--to form, if you will, "a more robust union."

    Dr. Muhanji approaches teaching social justice the same as the metaphor of jazz:
    The diverse "dissonant" notes from children's stories, anthropological texts, novels,
    plays, scientific victories and blunders, the war in Iraq, all serve not to bring harmony
    to the classroom, but rather to create a robust and rigorous sound, in which race,
    class, gender, and sexuality are exploded.

         Curriculum vitae for Cherry Muhanji

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