Last Tuesday, English professor Bert Ashe and his wife Valerie had just sat down for a delayed viewing of NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt when his wife’s phone started ringing. It was a friend from Massachusetts. Assuming she just wanted to chat, Val let the call go to voicemail.

Then, Ashe’s phone rang with a call from the same friend. Followed immediately by a text from a member of his book group.

“It read, ‘Finally, a Jeopardy! question I can answer,’” Ashe said. “And he had a screenshot of the question.”

The clue, in the category “D-D-S,” read: “This hairstyle is chronicled in professor Bert Ashe’s book Twisted.”

For a moment, Ashe thought it was an elaborate hoax, that his friend was trying to prank him. Then, more emails and phone calls started coming in.

“I have no idea how they found out about my book,” he said. “I had no sense that this was coming. It was completely out of the blue.”

He tuned in to watch as Amy Schneider, one of the show’s top-winning contestants, immediately buzzed in with the correct answer “dreadlocks”— further surprising Ashe — and the game moved on.

It’s not the first time Ashe or his book have made a national appearance.

Ashe’s research focuses on late-20th and early-21st century literature and culture, with a particular focus on post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture. The book that became a Jeopardy! clue is Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, which was published in 2015 and explores issues of Black male identity, the Black vernacular culture, and Black hair through his own experience of locking his hair.

Ashe has spoken about dreadlocks and the Black vernacular in outlets ranging from The Washington Post to WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

Still, he said, being the focus of a Jeopardy! clue stands out as a “delightfully bewildering” moment that stuck with him for days after the show aired.