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 African American archives, popular literature, and black radicalism. 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 the Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York. His work has appeared in such publications as The Journal of Higher Education and MELUS, and his expertise landed him a role in the Ice-T produced documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp.

Dr. Gifford’s work extends beyond the university community. He teaches an American literature course to a class of inmates at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center. He gathers books through independent fundraising and private donations, and he teaches authors such as Frederick Douglass, Margaret Atwood, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. He also brings college students into the prison, where they discuss literature with the inmates, and he continues to build relationships between the university and the prison.

He is currently a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is teaching, among other things, African American and U.S. American literature, cultural studies, and mass-market fiction.

His new book, Revolution or Death: The Story of Eldridge Cleaver, tells the story of one of the most notorious Black radicals in American history, and it untangles the complicated history of the Black Panther Party’s rise and fall.