At Columbia since 1985, Prof. Blount taught American and African American literary and cultural studies. He had been a Research Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, a Visiting Fellow at Wesleyan's Center for Afro-American Studies, a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Visiting Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He has published essays in PMLA, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Southern Review. He co-edited Representing Black Men with George Cunningham. His first study was entitled "In a Broken Tongue: Rediscovering African American Poetry." His latest project was entitled Listening for My Name: African American Men and the Politics of Friendship. He was the Sterling Brown '22 Visiting Professor of English at Williams College.