DaMaris B. Hill is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland (2020), which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland (2016), and \Vi-zә-bәl\ \Teks-chәrs\ (Visible Textures) (2015). She has a keen interest in the work of Toni Morrison and theories regarding “rememory” as a philosophy and aesthetic practice. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. Hill is an associate professor of English, creative writing, and African American studies at the University of Kentucky.
Allyson Hobbs is an associate professor of American history, the director of African and African American studies, and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post. She has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, and NPR. Her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (2014), won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history, and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book, and it was listed by The Root as one of the Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors.
Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is a scholar of labor, gender, race, and Southern history. Her most recent book is Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017), which won the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History; the Mary Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians; the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize and the Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association; the Willie Lee Rose Book Award, Southern Association of Women’s Historians; and the Deep South Book Prize, Frances S. Sumersell Center for the Study of the South. It was also a finalist for the Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997) also won multiple awards. She co-edited Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas (2004) with Sandra Gunning and Michele Mitchell and African American Urban Studies: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (2004) with Joe W. Trotter and Earl Lewis. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. A native of Miami, Florida, she received a BA from Duke University and a PhD from Yale University.
Sherrilyn Ifill is the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at LDF developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the twentieth century. Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization.
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the department of Africana studies at Wellesley College. Her book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2019) won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Stone Book Award at the Museum of African American History, and was named among thirteen books to read on African American history by The Washington Post. She is co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory. Her essays have been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, TIME, Transition, The Conversation, Black Perspectives, and Quartz. She has also been interviewed for her expertise by MSNBC, SkyNews (UK), The New York Times, PBS, Vox, HuffPost, C-SPAN, the BBC, Boston Public Radio, Al Jazeera International, and Slate. She has been featured in a host of documentaries on history and race in the United States.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years (2013), received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award as well as the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, TIME, Esquire, and elsewhere. The author of the nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (2019), he teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Karine Jean-Pierre is a seasoned political operative whose professional experience includes running presidential campaigns, leading grassroots activism, and working in the Obama White House. During the 2020 campaign cycle, Jean-Pierre drove strategy and executed major initiatives for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign as senior adviser to the campaign and chief of staff to the vice presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris. Prior to this, she served as the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn, one of the nation’s largest grassroots progressive organizations, and as a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Jean-Pierre is a veteran of electoral and advocacy campaigns on a local, state, and national level. She served as the deputy campaign manager for Martin O’Malley for President in 2016, and she led the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Initiative as campaign manager. In 2013 she managed Tish James’s successful campaign for New York City Public Advocate. Jean-Pierre is proud to be an alumna of the Obama White House and both the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In 2011 Jean-Pierre served as deputy battleground states director for President Obama’s reelection campaign, managing the president’s political engagement in key states while leading the delegate selection and ballot access process. Before joining the 2012 campaign, she served as the regional political director for the White House Office of Political Affairs. She was the Southeast regional political director on the Obama for America campaign in 2008, and served the John Edwards for President campaign in the same capacity earlier in the 2008 election cycle.
Martha S. Jones is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the history of democracy. She is the award-winning author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2008), and “All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, TIME, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She lives in Baltimore, where she is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and a professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Jones, Jr., is the author of the novel The Prophets (2021). Born and raised in New York City, he has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, and The Paris Review. He is the creator of the social justice social-media community Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.