Brenda E. Stevenson is the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair and a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA. Her book-length publications include The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (1988), Life in Black and White (1997), Underground Railroad (1998), The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins (2015), and What Is Slavery? (2015). Her publications have garnered the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize, the Ida B. Wells Award, and the Gustavus Meyer Outstanding Book Prize. Support for her research has come from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. She is the recipient of the UCLA Gold Shield Award, the John Blassingame Award from the Southern Historical Society, and the Carter G. Woodson Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), which was long-listed for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book. She is also the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. The Organization of American Historians appointed her a distinguished lecturer. Taylor is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University. Born and raised in Southern California, she earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois. She is the author of Heads of the Colored People (2018), which was long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction and was a Kirkus Prize finalist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She was a 2016 participant in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the 2017 Tin House Workshop, as well as a 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Stanley Elkin Scholar.
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark. She earned a BA in English and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and received an MAT in English from Brown University and both an MA in English and a PhD in American Studies from Harvard. She is the director of New Arts Justice at Express Newark and the co-founder of A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. A contributing critic at large for The New York Times, she is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of “The Color Purple”: The Story of Alice Walker’s Masterpiece (2021). In 2020 Tillet received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete the cultural biography All the Rage: Mississippi Goddam and the World Nina Simone Made, forthcoming from Ecco.
Jemar Tisby is CEO of The Witness Inc., an organization dedicated to Black uplift from a Christian perspective. He is co-host of Pass the Mic, a podcast that amplifies dynamic voices for a diverse church. His writing has been featured by The Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He has spoken nationwide at conferences on racial justice, U.S. history, and Christianity, and is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (2019) and How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice (2020). He studies race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century as a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi.
Sasha Turner is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (2017), which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It received honorable mention for the Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. She is currently working on a book on slavery and emotions. Her article “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” published in Slavery and Abolition (2017), has won awards from the African American Intellectual History Society, the Association of Black Women Historians, the Southern Association of Women Historians, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association.
Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities and is jointly appointed in the department of English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Wake Forest University. He has published broadly in the areas of Africana studies; critical theory and cultural studies; and religion, ethics, and public life. Professor Walker has held faculty and academic leadership positions at Brown University, the University of Virginia, Winston-Salem State University, and Virginia Union University, and he has had visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the University of Richmond.
Harriet A. Washington’s books include the forthcoming Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent (2021) and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She is a writing fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer in bioethics at Columbia University, and has been a Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a visiting fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University and in 2016 was elected a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Craig Steven Wilder is the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at MIT and a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. His most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013). He is the author of A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (2000) and In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (2001). He has taught at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Williams College and has been a visiting professor at the New School and University College London.
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval. Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality. Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, and was short-listed for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, making her the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the 6 million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South. Of her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), the venerable UK bookseller Waterstones says it is an “expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world.”