Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and in the history department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights, Joseph wrote the award-winning books Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006) and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (2010). His most recent book, Stokely: A Life (2014), has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “Black Power.” He edited The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (2006) and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (2010).
Blair L. M. Kelley is assistant dean for interdisciplinary studies and international programs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010), which won the prestigious Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Kelley is currently at work on Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class, which will be published by Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton.
Robin D. G. Kelley is a professor of history at UCLA. His books include Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990).
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (2017) and the full-length collections The Renunciations (forthcoming) and Bestiary (2016), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Bakari Kitwana is an internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop and Black youth political engagement. In 2020 he co-founded the Hip-Hop Political Education Coalition, which convened a major virtual summit on the ways the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated voter suppression efforts in Black and Brown communities. That convening builds on Kitwana’s work as executive director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fifteen years has conducted more than a hundred town hall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. Kitwana has been editor in chief of The Source, editorial director of Third World Press, and the co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, and he served on the organizing committee for the 2013 Black Youth Project convening that launched the millennial Black activist group BYP100. The author of the groundbreaking book The Hip-Hop Generation (2002), Kitwana is also the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop (2005), collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim’s memoir Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius (2019), and co-editor of the anthology Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (2020). As the 2019–20 Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, he curated the Hiphop and Presidential Elections Video Archive, a collection of more thirty national town hall meetings with hip-hop artists, activists, and scholars during the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections.
Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. His bestselling memoir Heavy: An American Memoir (2018) won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. Laymon is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American.
Christopher J. Lebron is an associate professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in political philosophy, social theory, philosophy of race, and democratic ethics. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (2013), won the American Political Science Association’s Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Award. His second book, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (2017), offers a brief intellectual history of the Black Lives Matter movement. He is the winner of the 2018 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, which recognizes a “career devoted to the humanities and a candidate whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” In addition to his scholarly publications, he is an active public intellectual, writing frequently for The New York Times’s philosophy column “The Stone,” Boston Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Billboard.
David A. Love is a writer, journalist, and commentator based in Philadelphia. He is a contributor to CNN Opinion, Al Jazeera, The Grio, and Atlanta Black Star, among other publications. He has taught journalism and media studies as an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and Temple University. Previously, he served as executive director of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, executive director of Witness to Innocence, and a law clerk to two federal judges. Love received a BA in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a certificate in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (2016).
Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is an assistant professor in the department of African American studies, the American Indian Studies Center, and the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of Afro-Indigenous studies, urban studies, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018). He has two forthcoming books: City of Dispossessions: African Americans, Indigenous Peoples, and the Creation of Modern Detroit and An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of Praise Song for the Butterflies (2018), which was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Book of Harlan (2016), winner of the American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her eight other critically acclaimed novels include Sugar (2001), Loving Donovan (2003), Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), and Glorious (2010), which was featured in O: The Oprah Magazine and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the Black Caucus American Library Association.
Heather C. McGhee advances solutions to racial and economic inequality in the United States. During her tenure as president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos (2014–18), she drafted legislation, testified before Congress, and became a regular contributor on NBC’s Meet the Press. She led Demos’s racial equity organizational transformation, resulting in a doubling of its racial diversity and growth across all measures of organizational impact. She was a leader in passing key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 as well as landmark consumer protections that have saved consumers over $50 billion in credit card fees. She is the chair of the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. Her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021), is forthcoming from One World.