She is the author of a biography of African-American novelist Pauline Hopkins. Entitled Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (University of Georgia Press, 2005), Wallinger’s biography was vital in helping to establish Hopkins as a major figure of African American literature. Her essays have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Black Liberation in the Americas. Together with John Gruesser she co-edited Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century.