Faculty Showcase

Jericho Brown

Director of the Creative Writing Program
Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing

Brown is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, New Republic, Buzzfeed, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry. His books include Please (2008), The New Testament (2014), and The Tradition (2019). The latter, in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry.

Zachary S. Buchwald

Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology
School of Medicine

Buchwald's primary clinical focus is radiation and immunotherapy for cutaneous malignancies. In his laboratory, he studies ways to enhance the immune response against melanoma and other cancers using radiation. Buchwald plans to continue translating these laboratory studies into clinical trials with the goal of improving long-term patient outcomes. He has been published in a number of leading journals, including Immunity, Cancer, JCI Insight, and Scientific Reports.

Tameka Cage Conley

Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing
Oxford College

Cage Conley is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work is published in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, and African American Review. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father, which considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Heather Christle

Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory College of Arts and Sciences

Christle is the author of four poetry collections: The Difficult Farm (2009), The Trees The Trees (2011), What Is Amazing (2013), and Heliopause (2016). Her first work of nonfiction, The Crying Book, was published in 2019. She has been a writer in residence and faculty member at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and is a contributing editor at jubilat.

Andrea G. Dittman

Assistant Professor of Organization and Management
Goizueta Business School

Dittman’s research focuses on how the social-class contexts in which people grow up shape their obstacles and strengths in professional workplaces. Her work has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Recently, she has been investigating how the pandemic disproportionately has affected people from lower social-class contexts across domains, including work, social relationships, and mental health.

Dayna A. Johnson

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology
Rollins School of Public Health

Johnson is interested in health disparities, cardiometabolic diseases, and social determinants of health. Her research addresses the root causes of sleep health disparities and their impact on cardiovascular disease through examining the social and environmental determinants of sleep disorders and insufficient sleep as well as investigating the influence of modifiable factors—such as sleep disorders and disturbances—on cardiovascular outcomes. She is also a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at Winship Cancer Institute.

Joel B. Kemp

Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible
Candler School of Theology

Kemp’s research interests in biblical studies center on the Old Testament, especially the latter prophets, biblical law, and the history of Judah and identity development. Additional scholarly pursuits include African American appropriations of Scripture; the relationship among race, religion, and law within American society; and the use of the Bible in popular culture. Kemp published his first book, Ezekiel, Law, and Judahite Identity, in 2020.

Matthew Lawrence

Associate Professor of Law
School of Law

Lawrence researches in the areas of health care finance, administrative law, and addictions, and he has published widely on these topics. He possesses considerable experience in the federal government, having recently served as a special legal adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee (Majority). Previously, he worked on health care regulatory issues during the Obama and Trump administrations. Lawrence is affiliate faculty at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology, where he was previously a Fellow.

Heeju Sohn

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Laney Graduate School

Sohn examines the intersection of health policy with family demography, social stratification, and health across the life-course. Recent projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have focused on the role of health policy and demographic trends in creating unequal safety-nets that reinforce social inequities. Her research aims to inform effective health and family policy that will alleviate the pervasive disadvantage that persists across generations.

Shaquita Starks

Assistant Clinical Professor
Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

Starks has 22 years of nursing experience and more than 12 years of advanced practice nursing experience. She currently practices as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. Her research addresses predictors of quality of life in African American women who are caregivers of family members with end-stage kidney disease, as well as the psychosocial impact of chronic stress in those caring for family members with mental health conditions.