Jessica Stovall is a doctoral candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at Stanford University. She holds a BS in Secondary Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a MS in Literature from Northwestern University. She has received the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching grant, the Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. Her current research explores Black teacher retention through examining how discourses of storytelling and ratification in Black teacher affinity spaces reverse Black teacher attrition. She is also conducting an oral history project with Black teachers who taught in the Bay Area during school integration. Before Stanford, she taught English for 11 years in the Chicagoland area.
