I am a biblical scholar, Episcopal priest and seminary professor. I publish as Wilda and Wil Gafney. I teach Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, Womanist, Feminist and Post-Colonial Biblical Studies, formerly at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, currently at Brite Divinity School in Ft. Worth, TX.

My scholarship includes prophecy and prophetic literature, rabbinic (Tanaaitic) literature, Ancient Near Eastern religious (especially prophetic and women's vocational) literature and traditional and contemporary midrash - biblical interpretation.

My personal love for vampire literature intersects with my professional biblical scholarship in my note in the Peoples' Bible on the Lilith who appears in Isaiah 34:14. She is regarded as the mother of vampires in later medieval midrash, but Isaiah had a much older night-stalking creature in mind...

I blog regularly at: wilgafney.com and tweet enthusiastically at @wilgafney. (You'll have to copy and paste.)

I teach New Testament courses at the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC. I have also taught at the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, NY. My first publication Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature analyzes the "ethno-political rhetoric" related to Ethiopians, Egyptians, Blacks, and blackness in early Christian writings. "Why does the Ethiopian come among us?" has been a driving question for my scholarship.

My second book, co-edited with Vanessa Lovelace, is titled Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse. In this volume I have an essay, “Black Collectors and Keepers of Tradition: Resources for a Womanist Biblical Ethic of (Re)Interpretation,” which describes the André Tweed Collection of Ethiopian Artifacts and Manuscripts housed at the Howard University School of Divinity.

I am an ordained minister of the Word and Sacrament (Teaching Elder) in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I worship regularly, and preach and lead workshops throughout the country for a variety of denominational bodies on topics dealing with race, ethnicity, and the Bible; womanist hermeneutics; women in the Bible, and early Ethiopian Christianity.

I teach Hebrew Bible/Old Testament courses in a historically Black theological setting. I am also an ordained preacher and teacher in the United Church of Christ. My research and teaching interests include interpreting biblical texts using feminist theory of gender and nation, particularly feminist studies in the politics of belonging and womanist methodological approaches that include Black women's lived experiences and the interlocking structures of gender, race, sexuality and class in relation to their encounters. My specific research areas include Deuteronomistic History and prophets and prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible.

I have been published in The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies and in the Journal of the ITC. There has been a recent revival in interest in the biblical figure Hagar since the fascination with her by nineteenth and early twentieth century novelists, whose main characters were often named Hagar. I have contributed essays on Hagar in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, especially antebellum southern White feminist authors. I am curious to see where this revived interest in Hagar leads.