Dr. Christopher Allen Varlack, the #BLKLitProfessor, is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arcadia University (2020-present) where he teaches courses in African diasporic literature and world literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Recipient of the 2021 Cultural Ally Award, he is the Associate Director of the new Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action (CASAA). Before joining the faculty at Arcadia, he worked with students as a full-time lecturer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2014-2018), where he taught as part of the Individualized Study Program, Honors College, and Department of English. He has also served as a full-time lecturer in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University (2012-2014).

​

In addition to promoting the education of today's youth, he is an avid researcher and scholar with emphases on race, gender, and cultural politics, having published articles in journals such as the College Language Association Journal, Third Stone Journal, and the South Atlantic Review in addition to a number of edited volumes. He has also served as editor of Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance (2015) as well as Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past and Present (2017), and he is currently editing Zora Neale Hurston in Context and a special double issue of The Langston Hughes Review on the life and legacy of Sterling Brown. He is currently in his second term as the president of the Langston Hughes Society.

​

When he is not in the classroom or producing scholarship, he can be found writing poetry and creative non-fiction that addresses issues of social justice, identity, and race.