Inducted: 2019
Mulberry Senior High Graduate, 1977
Dr. Maxine Lavon Montgomery is a professor of English at Florida State University where she teaches courses in American, African-American, and American multi-ethnic literature.
She is the first African-American to receive tenure and be promoted to full professor in Florida State's English Department. She has taught at FSU from 1988 until the present. She is the recipient of five Florida State University awards for excellence in teaching.
As a nationally recognized scholar in the field of African-American and American literary and cultural studies, she is the author or editor of six books: 'The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction' (University Press of Florida, 1996), 'Conversations With Gloria Naylor' (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 'The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance' (University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 'Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison' (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 'Conversations with Edwidge Danticat' (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), and 'Meditations on Race, Culture, and History: New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child' (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming 2018).
She earned her bachelor's degree in English education from Florida State University in 1980, her master's degree in English from Florida State University in 1982, and her doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1986.
She has also published numerous articles on African-American and women's Literature. Her essays have appeared in scholarly journals such as African American Review, College Language Association Journal, The South Carolina Review, The Journal of Black Studies and The Literary Griot.