Valérie K. Orlando is Professor of French & Francophone Literatures in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. Where she also serves as Head of the department. She is the author of six books: The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1959-1970 (University of Virginia Press in 2017); New African Cinema (Rutgers, 2017); Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (Ohio UP, 2011); Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco' in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009); Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003); and Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, (Ohio University Press, 1999).

She published with Sandra M. Cypess the co-edited volume, Reimaging the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French and Spanish Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2014) and has written numerous articles on Francophone writing from the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture.