Tara Bynum has been assistant professor of African American literature and culture at Hampshire College since fall 2017. She previously taught at the College of Charleston and Towson University and has published articles on Phillis Wheatley in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Common-place and other works of cultural criticism in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Tara was an AAS–NEH Fellow for the 2016–17 academic year with a project titled “Reading Pleasures.” In this interview Tara discusses her work on Wheatley’s poetry and why pleasure and joy were essential elements in the lives of African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.