Quick Take

• Stephanie Toliver’s impressive publishing record and unique approach to presenting her research helps her win a prestigious early career achievement award from the Literacy Research Association.
• Toliver’s book, Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork, written as speculative fiction, garners two book awards.
• She focuses her work on using speculative fiction to help Black youth articulate and challenge social justice and on helping teachers spur the imaginations and dreams of students in their writing.

Stephanie Toliver never planned to go into higher education. She never even planned to go to college.

One cousin had gone and then dropped out after a semester. Most of her family—her parents, an aunt, an uncle, and cousins—had served or were serving in the armed forces. Neither of those choices seemed good.

Instead, she thought a quick, six-month training to be a massage therapist would be the ticket.

Thankfully, her guidance counselor thought otherwise. She saw Toliver for who she really was, for the potential she had, and placed a call to Toliver’s mother. “We have to fix this,” the counselor told her mother, who agreed.

That phone call set Toliver on a very different path than she had intended.

An Early-Career Achiever

It has turned out to be a path to success and achievement for Toliver, an assistant professor in Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Just in her second year at Illinois, Toliver recently received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association. The award is given to a scholar who has earned their doctoral degree in the past seven years and has demonstrated excellence in research, service, and teaching in the field of literacy education.

“I was honestly flabbergasted and honored,” Toliver says of learning of her award. “In the history of the award [which began in 1999], only two other Black women, Tisha Lewis Ellison and Allison Skerrett, have received it. I’m honored to be in the company of such great Black women who are doing literacy research and also just flabbergasted because there are so many wonderful people who are doing the work that are in my generation of scholars. I’m super honored and humbled.”

Prolific Publishing Record

Toliver, in just her fifth year as an assistant professor (the first three at the University of Colorado Boulder), has a prolific publishing record. She has 28 peer-reviewed articles, 12 book chapters, and eight editorial-reviewed articles to her name and has one book under her belt with another deep in the works—and more in the pipeline.

Her publishing credentials no doubt influenced the LRA award committee—but it’s not just the quantity of publications that makes Toliver stand out. Her unique approach to her first book not only turned heads but garnered high praise and multiple awards.

Endarkened Storywork

Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork, which Toliver wrote for her dissertation, is written as speculative fiction, a genre that encompasses stories that conjecture about what could happen under different circumstances or realities. A partial description of the book, from the publisher Routledge’s website, reads: “By utilizing Black storytelling, Afrofuturism, and womanism as an onto-epistemological tool, this book asks readers to elevate Black imaginations, uplift Black dreams, and consider how Afrofuturity is qualitative futurity. By centering Black girls, the book considers the ethical responsibility of researchers to focus upon the words of our participants, not only as a means to better understand our historic and current world, but to better situate inquiry for what the future world and future research could look like.”

“Before my dissertation chair [at the University of Georgia] read any of the chapters, I had eighth grade girls read the chapters, because it was for them,” Toliver says. “That to me is powerful because they’re reading research.”

Toliver—a self-described “nerd” who likes anime and “read Asimov’s novels for fun as I was growing up”—wrote her first book as speculative fiction to reach a wider audience with her message.

“My mom is my best friend, but she gets bored with my academic articles,” Toliver laughs. “And I get it! Sometimes I don’t want to read my own writing because I’m bored too. But when I transform my findings into a story, she loves it. And my uncle, who never went to college, is asking me about womanism as a theory and about critical race theory because they were portrayed in my book in a specific way. It was because I tied the theories to a speculative lens in the context of the story.

“So, it’s thinking about analyzing stories, yes, but it’s also writing our research as stories so that other people who aren’t interested in reading the boring things that we often write for journals can find something, can find that data within our work.”

Book Awards Garnered

Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork won the Qualitative Research Book Award from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2023 and the American Educational Research Association Qualitative Research Special Interest Group Book Award in 2024. Toliver has also garnered a host of other awards from various educational organizations in her brief but ascending career.

Of her unique approach to her dissertation (and now to her second book, in the works), Toliver says, “I want to make it easier for those who come after. That’s why I decided to publish my dissertation rather than just leaving it in the repository at UGA—to show people it doesn’t have to be written in the way that other people think it has to. Especially considering the ways that Black people are storytelling beings.”

Her book has 11 chapters—six of them focused on the individual stories of six young Black females. “The preface explains my approach to the method and the companion analyses at the end of the book tell you about the research, but the main thing is showing how Black girls were writing these futures into existence—what they wanted to see, what was happening in the world around them,” Toliver says. “It was difficult to tie all the stories together, but I loved the process.”

Current Research

Toliver is currently doing research in her hometown of New Castle, Pennsylvania. She has contracted with the University of Chicago Press for a book based on her research. “I’m taking a histo-futurist approach, based on Octavia Butler’s ideas about histo-futurism, where she talks about the need to bring the history and the future together to think about the world we live in now and the world we might live in in the future,” Toliver explains.

The work, funded by the Spencer Foundation, explores the colonialist underpinnings of New Castle and its systematic oppression against people of color. But just as the first half of the book exposes the darkness of the city’s oppression, the second half reveals the light that shines nonetheless.

“Even with the anti-Blackness woven into the city, Black people are dreaming anyway,” Toliver notes. “I do this storytelling kind of work that’s like walking people through different rooms in a house to show how Black people are about the process of their own world-making.” Those worlds, she says, include family gatherings, community gatherings, and spiritual gatherings—the latter where people feel an interconnectedness.

Toliver is also developing a literacy project in Illinois, in collaboration with colleagues from the College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The work explores how educators are teaching writing.

“Literacy is declining across the state of Illinois and across the country,” she says. “People aren’t reading as much as they used to, and they aren’t writing as much as they used to. So, from the student teacher perspective, we’re looking at how they feel about teaching writing, and from the in-service teacher perspective, what they are doing in the teaching of writing. Are we still teaching the five-paragraph essay with your thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph? How is this helping or hindering students in their writing processes?”

She notes that much of her work is tied up with having young people write speculative stories—“but if they’re struggling with writing anything because of the lower literacy rates, then we have to figure out how to help them.”

The Winds of Change

Once Toliver switched plans from massage therapy school to college, she enrolled in Florida A&M University to study public relations. But as a junior, she switched to education “because I took an education course and it changed how I thought about the world,” she says.

The first in her family to attend a four-year university, Toliver taught high school English in Florida and Georgia for five years before burning out—because her leadership abilities led to an overwhelming number of extra duties and responsibilities being thrust upon her. “It’s called ‘the curse of competency,’” she laughs. The “curse of competency” occurs when you are valued as so essential and capable that people keep dumping more work and higher expectations on you.

As she was pondering what to do, she bumped into a former professor of hers from Florida A&M at an airport. He encouraged Toliver, who already had her master’s degree, to get her Ph.D.

“I feel like things happen when you need them to happen,” she says of that “chance” meeting.

After earning her Ph.D. at the University of Georgia in Language and Literacy Education, Toliver planned to go back to high school teaching, which was still near and dear to her heart. But she fell in love with the type of research she did while working on her Ph.D., so she remained in higher education, first at Colorado, and then, starting in 2023, at Illinois.

Part of a 'Powerhouse' of Faculty Research

“The Curriculum & Instruction Department, where I’m housed, is eighth in the country,” she says of being drawn to Illinois. “It’s really great in terms of the prestige of the College and the C&I program. We have a powerhouse of junior faculty in C&I, and I think we can do something really great for the field of literacy.”

Many C&I faculty are doing critical work focused on youth of color and how educators engage in equity and justice in literacy spaces, she says.

“And that doesn’t exist everywhere,” she adds. “To come to a place where there is a freshness and people wanting to engage in this work, I thought that was really powerful and I wanted to be part of that.”

Toliver focuses her research on issues that, as a teacher, she saw weren’t being honored in school spaces or things she wished she’d had when she was in school. Her focus on Black storytelling as a mechanism for social critique and transformation is rooted in these experiences.

A second focus is on using speculative fiction to assist Black youth in articulating and challenging social injustice. Another thrust of her work centers on exploring the use of creative and arts-based literacy pedagogies to help pre-service English teachers develop strategies to address racial injustice in their future classrooms.

“I want to help student teachers and practicing teachers imagine differently,” she says. “Often, adults don’t have enough time to dream and imagine, and because of that, we often stop young people from dreaming and imagining. I want to help student teachers specifically but also in-service teachers to think about their own imaginations in creating new things for education.”

Toliver says she is trying to help students who are like she was—intelligent and sharp but bored in school. She also wants to make a difference for nontraditional students—“those who don’t consider themselves to be readers or writers or good students. I want to make education better for them.”

Driven to Do More Through Storytelling

Toliver has achieved a lot in her young career. But she remains driven to accomplish more.

“There are two things that drive me,” she notes. “I want to break down the stereotypical idea of what Black people are like and who they are. We dream too. We dress up and go to science fiction cons. We watch Star Trek. I was the kid who would have loved for you to talk to me about YuYu Hakusho or Sailor Moon [Japanese manga series]. I would have loved for you to talk about how I love Broadway musicals. That was one of the dreams I had when I was little, to be on Broadway.”

The second thing that drives her is to make teachers aware that Black protagonists do exist literature.

“A lot of my analyses of texts feature Black protagonists, and I tell teachers that these books do exist,” Toliver says. “And I say here’s how you might teach them, here’s how you might think about them.”

Beyond that, Toliver is bent on supporting other scholars to do work that is creative, that pushes against the norm. And she wants to continue her own creative pursuits.

“I want to support junior scholars who are coming up to do things differently and give them permission to be creative,” she notes. “And I want to write books because I like thinking about things. I want to write books for English educators, for teachers, and for the Black communities that I work with and for.”

And, thinking of her hometown of New Castle, she wants to tell the stories of people in smaller communities.

“These are like ‘drive-by’ towns, where you drive by on your way to somewhere else,” she explains. “I want folks in academic spaces to see the places that we ignore. Because they have stories worth hearing too.”