Pia Deas received her Masters in poetry in 2001. Her thesis was titled Cargo. After Temple, she went on to earn her Masters in English literature and is now working towards her Ph.D. at Penn State-University Park, specializing in African American Literature. Her dissertation in progress is titled Black Satire and the New Black Esthetic. She curated an exhibit titled "Changing the Joke/Slipping the Yoke: Humor in African American Fiction" for the Penn State Library in 2005. The exhibit examined humor in African American fiction and the ways that stories that make people laugh can also highlight and resist oppression.