Alicia Garza is an organizer, political strategist, and cheeseburger enthusiast. She is the principal at the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund; the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network; strategy and partnerships director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance; and host of the podcast Lady Don’t Take No. Her first book was The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (2020).
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997); Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (2001); Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002); a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (2010); and, most recently, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen’s College) in 2014–15. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018–19 president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and she is the current president of the Ames Foundation. A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019 she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the inaugural chair of the African American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia University. She is also the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She received her BA from Harvard and her PhD in American studies from Yale. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (1995), Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford Connecticut, 1854–1868 (1999), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (2013). She is the co-author, with Salim Washington, of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (2008).
Kali Nicole Gross is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Her research explores Black women’s experiences in the U.S. criminal justice system. Her opinion pieces have been published by BBC News, HuffPost, and The Washington Post, and she has appeared on NPR and C-SPAN. She has authored two award-winning books: Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (2006) and Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (2016). Her latest book, co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry, is A Black Women’s History of the United States (2020).
Alexis Pauline Gumbs portrayed Phillis Wheatley in first grade in the Black History Month play at her all-white private school. She wrote her first literary essay, on June Jordan’s “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” while in her first year at Barnard College, which is also June Jordan’s alma mater. Gumbs is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020), and is co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016). She is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, creative writing editor for Feminist Studies, and celebrant in residence at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina, where she and her partner, Sangodare, are creating an intergenerational living library of Black Queer Brilliance.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College. She has published a number of texts in African American and women’s studies that have been noted as important works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979), which she co-edited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880–1920 (1990); and Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995). Her most recent publication is an anthology co-edited with Johnnetta B. Cole, Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign (2010). In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women, devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent. She is the past president of the National Women’s Studies Association and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017).
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017 she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016 she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the numbers of investigative reporters of color.
Michael Harriot is an award-winning journalist with The Root, where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. He earned degrees in mass communications and history from Auburn University and a master’s in international business and macroeconomics from Florida State University. He was a 2018 fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center on Media, Crime, and Justice and created the curriculum for the course “Race as an Economic Construct.” He is also a heralded spoken word poet and won the National Association of Black Journalists Award for television newswriting and digital commentary. A native of Hartsville, South Carolina, he currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama.
Mary E. Hicks is an assistant professor of Black studies and history at Amherst College. She has served as a Mamolen Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a Ford Fellow and Jefferson Fellow. Her research examines the maritime dimensions of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century colonial Brazil. She is the author of “Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500–1840” and “Transatlantic Threads of Meaning: West African Textile Entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770–1870,” both published in the journal Slavery & Abolition. Her forthcoming book is Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721–1835.