Justin Gifford is a professor of English Literature and a nationally-recognized biographer and scholar of American literature and culture.

His research and teaching focus on U.S. American literature and culture, with a special interest in archival research and popular culture. He is the critically-acclaimed author of three books, including the definitive biographies of Iceberg Slim and Eldridge Cleaver. His book Street Poison was chosen as one of Amazon.com’s top 100 books of the year, and his research earned him a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. 

He is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is teaching, among other things, U.S. American literature, cultural studies, and popular fiction.

His forthcoming book is titled, Time Considered as a Helix: The Life of Samuel R. Delany. It draws from hundreds of hours of personal interviews with Mr. Delany, as well as his massive archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Museum to provide the first biography of one of the most significant and influential popular American writers of the 20th century.