Ishmael Reed is the author of novels, plays, poetry, and nonfiction, and has received prizes in every category. His novel Mumbo Jumbo has been cited by Harold Bloom as one of five hundred great books of the Western canon. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship and is one of a handful of authors to be nominated for two National Book Awards within the same year. He is also a songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Gregory Porter, Cassandra Wilson, Macy Gray, Taj Mahal, and Bobby Womack. His poem “Just Rollin’ Along,” about the 1934 encounter between Bonnie and Clyde and Oakland Blues artist L. C. Good Rockin’ Robinson was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2019. It is also included in Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues: Poems 2007–2019 (2020). Also published in 2020, from Archway Books, is Reed’s ninth and newest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which premiered at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in May 2019. His audio book Malcolm and Me (2020) is available from Audible. The Terrible Fours, the third novel in his “Terrible” series, will be published by Baraka Books in spring 2021. His online literary magazine, Konch, can be found at www.ishmaelreedpub.com.
Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist whose preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), both published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in South Carolina, he participates in vague spirituality and alternative rock music cultures and enjoys smelling like outside.
Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, specializes in the Black radical tradition and African American political culture after World War II. His most recent book, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (2019), received the Liberty Legacy Award from the Organization of American Historians. He is currently working on a book about Guyana and African American radical politics in the 1970s. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Souls, New Labor Review, and other publications. His popular writing has appeared in In These Times, Truthout, The Washington Post, and CounterPunch.
Dorothy E. Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the departments of Africana studies and sociology and at the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Internationally recognized for her work on racism in science, medicine, and legal institutions, Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1998), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2003), Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2012), and more than one hundred scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor of six books. Her honors include election to the National Academy of Medicine and receiving the Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award.
Walter C. Rucker is a professor of African American studies and history at Emory University. He is a specialist in early Atlantic African diaspora and African American history; his teaching and research focus on the generative nexus between slave resistance and culture in the formation of neo-African ethnic groups in the western hemisphere. His books include Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (2015), The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (2005), a co-edited two-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (2006), and a co-edited three-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of African American History (2010). In addition, he has published a range of book chapters and articles appearing in the Journal of Negro History, The Journal of Black Studies, and The Black Scholar.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow (2019), published by One World. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Prize, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and Kenyon Review. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020–21 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. His next book, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, will be published by One World in 2021.
Eugene Scott joined The Washington Post in September 2017 to report on the politics of identity in the Trump era. He previously worked at CNN Politics, where he covered the 2016 presidential election and was a senior reporter on the website’s breaking news team. He is a regular on-air contributor, providing analysis on MSNBC, CBS, and NPR. Before receiving his master’s from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a researcher for TIME, he spent nearly a decade writing for the USA Today network in Phoenix. He is on the board of advisers at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media and was recently a fellow at the Georgetown University Institute of Politics.
Chet’la Sebree is the author of the forthcoming Field Study (2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress (2019), winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. She is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University.
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2019 he won the Sidney Hillman award for commentary.
Barbara Smith is an author, activist, and independent scholar who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She was among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith was published in 2014 by SUNY Press. A biography of Smith by Joseph R. Fitzgerald is forthcoming.
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the poetry collection Counting Descent (2016), which won the award for best poetry collection from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of the forthcoming narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed (2021). His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Smith received his BA from Davidson College and a PhD in education from Harvard University.
Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is a Guggenheim fellow; an NEA grant recipient; a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, and MacDowell; a Cave Canem faculty member; professor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University; and a distinguished professor for the City University of New York.