This proposed collaborative session brings together members of the Genre Studies: Life Writing Forum and the College Language Association (CLA). Happily, some MLA members named in the proposal are also members of the MLA African American Forum as well as other organizations. Our multimodal, transdisciplinary session seeks to foster greater collaboration between the members of these organizations, but foremost to share with MLA members cutting-edge research from transnational Black life writing and auto/biography studies. Presenters will discuss diverse forms of African American self-representation through studies of a range of personal narratives from the African diaspora over the past century. We propose a panel attending to the recovered private diaries of a bisexual activist-writer, the spiritual autobiography of an incarcerated Black woman, Christianity-inflected hip hop performance and song lyrics, and a Black woman biographer's search for a Black woman educator overlooked in the archive. Each presenter will speak for up to 12 minutes, leaving ample time for lively discussion.