Deja Groomes

Deja Groomes is a second-year master's student in the Department of English at Texas Christian University. Deja’s research interests include African American Literature, with focus areas in Black women’s writing, Black Girlhood Studies, and Black Speculation. In her research, Deja is interested in centering the self-theorizing and speculative world-making practices of Black girlhood and Black daughterhood in literature. She is expected to graduate in May 2026.

 

Prior to pursuing her master’s degree, Deja graduated from TCU in 2022 with her Bachelor of Arts in English and then worked as a writing tutor at Tarrant County College Northwest. She currently serves as a Writing Assistant at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Through her writing center experience, Deja found her passion for assisting others in their writing journey and her commitment to sharing the power of the written word.

 

Deja’s master’s thesis, tentatively titled “Traversing Time, Myths, and Spirits: Daughterhood in the Black Woman’s Speculative Tradition,” will focus on mapping how Black women writers create counter-narratives of daughterhood and girlhood across twentieth and twenty-first century speculative texts.    

 

Deja recently presented the paper “Toward a Black Daughterhood Epistemology” on a panel at the Creative-Critical Literacies & Communities Virtual Symposium in October 2025. The presentation explored Black daughterhood as an epistemology and rhetorical device that evokes futurity, reflection, and healing in Black women’s speculative fiction. 

 

Her most recent publication, "‘Nothing Less Than Alter the World’: Afrofuturist Daughterhood in Toni Morrison’s ‘A Knowing So Deep' and Beloved" was published in the journal Femspec in November 2025. The article posits that an intertextual reading of Morrison’s 1985 essay “A Knowing So Deep” and the 1987 novel Beloved creates an alternate vision of Black girlhood futures through what she refers to as Afrofuturist daughterhood.