Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, and Professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and managing editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the winner of numerous book awards; in 2023, she won a James Beard Award for her essay "On Boba," published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

"A deeply historicized engagement with the new materialism, and a reading of the aesthetics of state biopower in the context of the rise of microbiology, Deviant Matter looks at the history of food, science, medicine and intoxication to explain how particular kinds of matter, including jelly, rot, intoxicants, and ferment, became figures for deviant life as new sciences of hygiene and energy management became tools of state power"--