Kendra R. Parkeris assistant professor of African American Literature in the Department of Literature at Georgia Southern University

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The First Bite1. “I’m not the vampire he is; I give in return for my taking.” The Black Female Vampire Figure in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind2. Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories: Black Female Vampire as a New American Monomyth3. Intersectional Disempowerment and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Vindication of the Rights of Anita Hill in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling?4. “She’s not turning. She’s in flux”: The Ability/Disability System in L.A. Banks’s The Bitten5. Rehabilitative Logic: Sex Work, Procreation, and Vampires in Pearl Cleage’s Just Wanna TestifyAfterword: The Final BiteBibliography

She Bites Back explores the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the vampire historically and as it appears in African American women’s fic­tion, particularly as these texts use the vampire to interrogate notions of black women’s sexuality, agency, and value in varied communities. . . Parker offers significant insight into the ways contemporary African American women writers reinvent possibilities for black women through evaluating and rejecting tired tropes, positing and practicing an ethics of care, and claiming the right to agency, power, and self-definition, but doing so not as a monolith but through inventive, imaginative diver­sity—not as an “age” but as a necessary, significant, and potentially trans­formative moment.