Bert Ashe: Black Hair Speaks for the Black Body: Bert Ashe’s "Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles"

Bert Ashe is the author of Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles (Agate, 2015), a finalist for the Library of Virginia nonfiction award. Ashe is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Richmond, and his scholarly and teaching interests include jazz, basketball, a school of contemporary art called “post-blackness,” and black hair. For more than twenty years Ashe has explored the cultural impact of black hair in America, from “’Why don’t he like my hair?’: Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” in African American Review (1995) and “’Hair Drama’ on the Cover of Vibe Magazine,” in the Journal of Race, Gender & Class (2001), to “Invisible Dread,” in Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities (Hampton Press, 2010) and “Renegades in the Kitchen” in The Hair Craft Project catalogue (2015). A native of Los Angeles and father of two, he lives with his wife in Richmond, Virginia.