Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple-prize-winning histories, most recently The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017). She has published historical fiction, a study of haunted Southern sites, and academic articles and chapters, as well as op-eds in various venues. Her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her forthcoming book, which will be released by Random House, is titled All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Miles is currently a professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.
Brentin Mock is a writer and editor for Bloomberg CityLab in Pittsburgh, focused on issues of racial, economic, and environmental justice.
Jennifer L. Morgan is a professor of history in the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University, which she also serves as chair. She is the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (2016). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in the Black Atlantic world. Her recent journal articles include “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery” in Small Axe (2018), “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Trans-Atlantic Passages” in History of the Present (2016), and “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism” in Social Text (2015). In addition to her archival work as a historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007). Her newest work, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world, and will be published by Duke University Press in spring 2021.
Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019), Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2016), and Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (2000). She is the editor of Letters from Black America (2011).
Ijeoma Oluo is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (2020). Her work on race has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many others. She has twice been named to the Root 100, and she received the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award and the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians’ distinguished lecturer and a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists research fellow, and has won a number of prestigious honors for her scholarly and advocacy work in reproductive and birthing justice. A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken widely across the United States and Europe. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences and reproductive justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book on African American women’s and gender history.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the California Book Award–nominated young adult novel Who Put This Song On? (2019) and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), and Magical Negro (2019), which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and California Book Award. Her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. Parker’s work has appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, TIME, Best American Poetry, and Playbill. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.
Nakia D. Parker is a College of Social Science dean’s research associate in the Department of History at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include slavery, migration, African American history, and Native American history. Her current book manuscript, Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country, 1830–1866, examines the forced migrations, labor practices, kinship networks, and resistance strategies of people of African and Afro-Native descent in Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholding communities. In addition to her academic articles, her research has been featured on several public history websites and television, including The History Channel, Teaching Hard History, and 15 Minute History.
Imani Perry currently serves as the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 2009, after seven years as a professor at Rutgers School of Law, where she taught constitutional law, contracts, and U.S. legal history. She is the author of six books, including Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004), More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018), and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Her next book, South to America: A Journey, will be published in summer 2021 by Ecco. This book is a travel narrative in the tradition of Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place and V. S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South.
john a. powell is director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and professor of law, African American studies, and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously the executive director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, and prior to that, the founder and director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. powell formerly served as the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is a co-founder of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. powell led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, healthcare, and employment and is well known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions. He has taught at numerous law schools, including those at Harvard and Columbia universities. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society (2012).
Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and before that was a professor at Harvard University for nearly a decade. His research explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade make disease, disability, and premature death seem natural for urban residents of color, who are often seen as disposable. Ralph’s first book, Renegade Dreams (2014), received the C. Wright Mills Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the social sciences. His second book, The Torture Letters (2020), explores a decades-long scandal related to hundreds of Black men who were tortured in police custody. He has been awarded a number of prestigious fellowships for his research, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the National Research Council of the National Academies. He earned his PhD and master’s degrees in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor of science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in history, technology, and society. Ralph’s writing has been featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Chicago Review of Books, Boston Review, and Foreign Affairs, to name a few.