Kaaronica Evans-Ware is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of California Santa Barbara. She completed her undergraduate degree at Northwestern University while also publishing her first non-fiction book. During the end of her tenure at Northwestern University, Kaaronica began researching Islamic esotericism and slavery for her speculative and fantasy Islamic fiction series, Fire & Clay. The research into this historical fiction series expanded into scholarly interests that rethink how Anglo-American literary conventions and Islamic cosmological understandings shape African American literature. At the heart of her research is the exploration of specific subsets of Islamic and African influences that often go under-examined and under-explored. Her work is further rooted in phenomenology, folklore, history, and ethnography as necessary components in the exploration of an alternative system of meanings and perspectives. 

Kaaronica has presented on the traces of Islamic cosmology and mysticism in African American culture. Due to her work and approach to fiction, she has been invited to participate as a keynote panelist on the emerging field of Muslim Futurism at the inaugural Muslim Futurism Conference in 2022. In addition, Kaaronica has been invited as a panelist for upcoming conference on Being Black and Muslim in Literature. Like her fiction, Kaaronica sees her scholarly research as being at the forefront of an emerging field of African American women’s speculative fiction with non-exclusionary Islamic themes. Her work with the Global Latinidades Project has provided critical support and access to research materials.