Randal Maurice Jelks

Randal Maurice Jelks is a professor, a documentary producer, and award-winning author. His latest book Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America (Chicago Review Press, January 11, 2022) evokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and contains 12 meditations on many of the public issues currently faced by citizens in the United States—economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. Jelks was an executive producer of the documentary I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled and he currently teaches American Studies, African Studies, and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he also serves as co-editor of the academic journal American Studies.