Stephen Stacks is a versatile and expectation-defying writer, academic, and musician. He lives in North Carolina with his family where, in addition to writing, he teaches at North Carolina Central University. He is a proud member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

Stephen's speculative fiction imagines futures and alternative pasts where humanity's most intractable problems are more malleable. His short fiction has been published in The First Line. He is currently working on a speculative thriller set in an alternative Reconstruction-era America.

Stephen also has a Ph.D. in musicology. His scholarship focuses on music's relationship to race, identity, and social protest. His monograph The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song after 1968 explores civil rights singing in the period after the movement as a site of ongoing political struggle. The Resounding Revolution is scheduled for publication in Spring 2025 from University of Illinois Press.