Samantha Adams (she/her) is a Milwaukee native, freshwater enthusiast, and Ph.D. Candidate at the English & Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her dissertation project, ‘A Body of Water Inside Me’: Insurgent Waterscapes Shaping African American Life and Literature in the Early 20th Century,” indexes three forms of water beyond the Atlantic Ocean/the Middle Passage and their relationships to literary and historical Black life: the literary Lake Michigan Chicago beachfront in 1919, Floridian waters in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and four Black girls navigating swimming pools in Philadelphia, Harlem, and St. Augustine. She lives in the places where African American literature, Ecocriticisms, and Black Feminisms touch.