Susanna L. Sacks

About Fellow

Susanna Sacks is an associate professor of literature and writing (English) at Howard University, where she teaches courses on African literature, global Black poetry, and literary theory. Her research draws on methods from sociology, digital studies, and performance studies to examine the influence of transnational platforms on African poetic forms and networks in the twenty-first century. Her first book project, Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry (UMass Press 2024)—which received the 2024 Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize in African Studies—argues that the rise of social media platforms catalyzed a transformation in the production of cultural capital in southern Africa. Her current work examines the interplay between state debt and artistic production, exploring how global funding structures influence African literary production, and how literary collectives work around market systems to develop alternative forms of value, relation, and exchange. 

Recent publications based on this work include a study on poetry on platforms (College Literature, 2026) and on digital experimentations (in African Digital Cultures, ed. James Yeku and Leah Junke, 2026); a chapter on cultural development funding and slam poetry in South Africa (in Expressive Networks, ed. Matthew Kilbane, 2024); an article on workshop theater and historiographic activism (PMLA 2023); and special issues on “Reading with Algorithms,” coedited with Sarah Brouillette (Post45, 2023) and on “Sound Studies from Africa,” coedited with Scott Newman (Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2023).

Selected Publications

• Sacks, Susanna. Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry. University of Massachusetts Press, 2024.
• Sacks, Susanna. “Evan Mawarire’s #ThisFlag as Tactical Lyric: The Role of Digital Speech in Imagining a Networked Zimbabwean Nation.” African Studies Review 63, no. 2 (2020): 238–57.
• Sacks, Susanna. “From Plinth to Stage: Protest Theater as Historiographic Activism in The Fall (2018).” PMLA 138, no. 1 (2023): 68–82.
• Sacks, Susanna. “Moving Forms: Individuals, Institutions, and the Production of Slam Poetry Networks in Southern Africa.” ASAP/Journal 5, no. 1 (2020): 153–79.
• Sacks, Susanna. “Reading the Poetry of Algorithms: Methods for Locating the Human in Social Media Poetry.” College Literature 53, no. 3 (2026): 452–80.
• Sacks, Susanna. “The Promise of a Pan-African Poetics: The Spoken Word Project, IGO Funding, and the Curation of Contemporary Poetry.” In Expressive Networks, edited by Matthew Kilbane, 129–45. Amherst College Press, 2025.