18th National Black Writers Conference: Expanding Conversations on Environmental Justice, Popular Culture, Resilience, and Peace
Honorees
Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written five collections of poetry, including America, A Love Story, Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Camille Dungy
Kassahun Checole
Kassahun Checole, president and publisher of Africa World Press and The Red Sea Press, formerly taught at Rutgers University and El Colegio de Mexico. Checole is the recipient of many academic honors and equally numerous recognitions for his activist work. In January 2000 he served as one of the organizers of the first international conference in independent Eritrea, “Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures in the 21st Century.”
Kassahun Checole
Imani Perry
Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of “South to America” and seven other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Massachusetts with her two sons. Her recent book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” is featured in the 2025 National Book Festival.
Imani Perry
Key Speakers
Wednesday, March 25 • 6 pm - 8 pm
Opening Conversation
Dr. Brenda M. Greene
Dr. Brenda M. Greene is a former Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. Professor Greene’s research and scholarship include African American literature, composition, and multicultural literature. She is editor of The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas and co-editor of Resistance and Transformation: Conversations with Black Writers; Meditations and Ascensions: Black Writers on Writing; Redefining Ourselves, Black Writers in the Nineties; and Rethinking American Literature and she has written extensive essays, book reviews, and grants in English Studies.
Known as a literary activist over the years, Dr. Greene has consistently pursued her passion of expanding, broadening, and enriching the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of the literature produced by Black writers and is the visionary behind groundbreaking public and academic programs that support Black Writers. Her educational leadership and professional accomplishments span more than 50 years. She has also been the host of the long-running weekly program, Writers on Writing, heard on New York airwaves (WNYE, 91.5 FM) and globally online. The program features writers of the African Diaspora discussing their lives, their creative process, and their work (novels, poems, plays, nonfiction, and more).
Dr. Greene has been inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Her awards include the Lucille Rose Living Legend Award from the Brooklyn Chapter of the NAACP; the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Award from the Brooklyn United Scholarship Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Oldtimers Foundation, the Lynnette Velasco Community Impact Award sponsored by the Harlem Arts Festival, the Educational Leadership Award sponsored by the MEC Community Council, the City College Women in Arts and Culture Award, the Phenomenal Women in the Media Award sponsored by Our Time Press; the Betty Smith Arts Award from the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office; and the National Conference of Artists Award for Excellence in the Promotion of Black Literature. She was also appointed as a member of the CUNY Planning Commission on Black, Race and Ethnic Studies and as a member of the Advisory Board for the Black Studies Education Equity Action Plan Coalition.
Dr. Greene is the proud mother of two sons, Talib Kweli Greene, an internationally known hip hop artist, Jamal K. Greene, Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia University. For more information visit www.drbrendamgreene.com.
Dr. Brenda M. Greene
MODERATOR
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine investigating racial inequality and injustice – earning a MacArthur Fellowship, a Peabody Award, George Polk Awards and National Magazine Awards.
Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University and founder of the Center for Journalism & Democracy, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the 1619 Freedom School. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from UNC at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor of Arts in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.
Nicole Hannah-Jones
Michael Harriot
Michael Harriot is the New York Times bestselling author of BLACK AF HISTORY: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America and founder of the digital journalism collective ContrabandCamp.com. The winner of Harvard’s David Nyhan Prize for public policy journalism, Michael’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC, BET, and on his mother’s refrigerator. He is a political commentator on MSNBC and CNN and has been honored by the National Association of Black Journalists for commentary, digital commentary, and TV news writing. His college course “Race: An Economic Construct,” was adapted by university economics departments across the country as a model for teaching the combination of history, economics, politics, and class structures.
You can visit Michael at: https://www.michaelharriot.com/
Michael Harriot
Friday, March 27 • 10 am - 11:30 am
African Diasporic Literature: Paths Towards Resilience & Healing
Dr. Uche Blackstock
Dr. Uché Blackstock is a physician, thought leader, and the Founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity (AHE). A former Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, she also served as Faculty Director for Diversity Affairs. In 2019, she launched AHE to partner with healthcare organizations, embedding equity into leadership, strategy, and clinical practice. Over the past five years, AHE has helped hospitals, health systems, and companies design strategies to advance equitable care.
Dr. Blackstock is a former MSNBC medical contributor and her writing, including numerous OpEds, have appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, Chicago Tribune, and New York Magazine. She has been recognized by Fortune as an Innovator Shaping the Future of Health (2023), and TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Health (2024). Her memoir, LEGACY: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine, became an instant New York Times bestseller in 2024.
Dr. Uche Blackstock
MODERATOR
Lesa Cline-Ransome
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and scholar. She has published five books of poetry, including The Age of Phillis , which won the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Prize in Poetry, was a finalist for the George Washington Prize in History, and was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Jeffers’s first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, featured on President Barack Obama’s reading list, and listed as a “Ten Best Books of the Year” by The New York Times. Love Songs won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. Love Songs was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, included on The Atlantic’s “Great American Novels” and has been translated into several languages. The French translation of Love Songs was longlisted for the Grand Prix de Littérature Americaine in France. Jeffers’s newest publication and nonfiction debut, Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews and was featured on several “must-read” lists. Jeffers is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Lee Hawkins
Lee Hawkins is the author of I Am Nobody’s Slave (HarperCollins, 2025), a critically acclaimed memoir tracing 400 years of his family through slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and their intergenerational effects. The book earned starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, was an Oprah Daily Black History Month pick, and an Amazon Editors’ Pick. Hawkins created and produced the 2024 APM/MPR podcast What Happened in Alabama?, named a “Best Podcast of the Year” by The Guardian and Audible and a Top-25 Apple Podcasts show. A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist during his 19 years at The Wall Street Journal, he reports across print, audio, and video, using DNA analysis, genealogy, and oral history to surface buried truths. His honors include the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, and six National Association of Black Journalists “Salute to Excellence” awards. Raised in Minnesota’s historic Rondo community, he writes toward truth, healing, and repair.
Lee Hawkins
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of four books.
Her children's picture book BLUE: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter, was named among the best of 2022 by NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, The Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature, Bank Street College of Education, and more. BLUE is on the 2023-2024 Texas Bluebonnet Master List; it has been honored with the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® recognizing excellence in the writing of non-fiction for children; and it is an NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature for Children. It was named to the American Library Association's 2023 Notable Children's Books and nominated for a 2025 Georgia Children's Book Award. The German translation, BLAU, was published in June 2025.
Brew-Hammond also wrote the young adult novel Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, and she edited RELATIONS: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. Kirkus Reviews called the anthology "smart, generous...a true gift" in its starred review.
Her novel for adult readers, My Parents' Marriage, was named among the best books of 2024 by The Boston Globe and Brittle Paper, and included on Teen Vogue's summer 2025 reads list. It was also featured in The New York Times Book Review's July 7, 2024 "...Also Out Now" column, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and more. The author Melissa Rivero called My Parents' Marriage "a propulsive read that will take hold of you with its honesty, determination, and heart," while the author Vanessa Walters described it as "an arrestingly evocative story...which dismantles immigrant clichés."
Brew-Hammond's short fiction for adult readers is included in the anthologies Accra Noir edited by Nana-Ama Danquah, Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby, Everyday People edited by Jennifer Baker, and Woman's Work edited by Michelle Sewell, among others. Addittionally, her writing has appeared in Now2, African Writing, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sunday Salon.
From 2018-2023, Brew-Hammond was a Pa Gya! Literary Festival Guest Author, and she was a 2019 Edward Albee Foundation Fellow, a 2018 Aké Arts and Book Festival Guest Author, a 2018 Hobart Festival of Women Writers Guest Author, a 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, a 2016 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, a 2015 Rhode Island Writers Colony Writer-in-Residence, and in both 2015 and 2014, she was shortlisted for a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship.
Tapped for her passion about Africa's varied fashion traditions and techniques, Brew-Hammond was commissioned by the curators of Brooklyn Museum's "Africa Fashion" exhibit to pen and perform an original poem for the museum's companion short film of the same name. In the clip, she wore a look from the made-in-Ghana lifestyle line she co-founded with her mother and sister, Exit 14. The brand was featured on Vogue.com. Brew-Hammond's fashion sense has been captured by New York Magazine, Essence Magazine, BFA, TheSartorialist.com, Paper Magazine, and The New York Times, among many other outlets.
Every month, Brew-Hammond co-leads the Redeemed Writers Group whose mission is to write light into the darkness. Learn more about it here.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Friday, March 27 • 12:15 pm - 1:45 pm
The Representation of Resistance in the Literature by African Diasporic Writers
Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and internet yeller. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, Mediocre, and Be a Revolution. Her work on race and gender has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News; and she has been featured on The Daily Show and NPR’s All Things Considered. Named on the TIME 100 Next list and The Root 100, she’s been awarded the Harvard Humanist of the Year Award, the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Humanist Award, Gender Justice League’s Media Justice Award, and the Equal Opportunity Institute’s Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award.
Ijeoma Oluo
MODERATOR
Jennifer L. Morgan
Jennifer L. Morgan is the Silver Family Professor of History in NYU’s Departments of Social & Cultural Analysis and History. In 2024, she received a MacArthur “genius” Award and was the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.
She is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021), which won the Mary Nickliss Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize, and Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). She also co-edited Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her research explores how gender and race intersected in the early modern Black Atlantic.
She’s currently working on The Eve of Slavery, a study of slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century centered on Elizabeth Key, a Black woman who successfully sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656. She also serves as Executive Producer for Key to Freedom, a narrative film written and directed by her daughter, Emma “Zinha” Morgan-Bennett.
Morgan has served as Council Chair for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, was Vice President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and is a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians.
Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan
Regina Mahone
Regina Mahone is a writer and editor whose work explores the intersections between race, class, and reproductive rights. As a senior editor at The Nation magazine, she edits articles on a range of topics, including national politics, and runs Repro Nation, a monthly newsletter about global efforts to protect reproductive freedom. She and her co-author, We Testify Founder Renee Bracey Sherman, are. authors of LIBERATING ABORTION: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve and co-hosts of the podcast The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion from The Meteor. Regina has written for publications including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Rewire News Group, Romper, The Nation, and Truthout. She lives in New Jersey with her partner and two children.
Regina Mahone
Renee Bracey Sherman
Renee Bracey Sherman is a reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and writer. For a decade she led We Testify, an organization she founded dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and share their stories at the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. She is also an executive producer of Ours to Tell, an award-winning documentary elevating the voices of people who've had abortions. Her writing can be found in a variety of newspapers and several books including Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements, Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade, and Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. In 2024, she and her co-author Regina Mahone released their debut book, LIBERATING ABORTION: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve and they are also the co-hosts of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor. She lives in Washington, DC where she is a PhD student at American University’s School of Communication.
Renee Bracey Sherman
Friday, March 27 • 2:30 pm - 4 pm
The Influence of Media and Technology in Literature by African Diasporic Writers
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and impact strategist from New York City. Her editing debut won an Emmy, and she has continued to distinguish herself as a producer, editor, and director. Sabrina was selected for the prestigious Women at Sundance Fellowship in 2017, and in June 2018 was inducted into The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
She is the producer of Quest, a New York Times Critic’s Pick which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for numerous awards including two Emmys, a Peabody and two Independent Spirit Awards. Vogue interviewed Sabrina to discuss the making of the film in “A Documentary Disrupts American Narratives About Race.” Sabrina’s directorial debut was the Emmy-nominated BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, which she co-directed, co-produced, and edited, and which won Best Film Directed by a Woman of Color at the African Diaspora International Film Festival. She is the co-producer and editor of Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which also premiered at Sundance, and Documented, the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning undocumented journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas. Documented had record-breaking viewership on CNN and was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Best Documentary.
Sabrina produces, directs and edits content for many journalism platforms, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York magazine, and FRONTLINE. She is co-chair of the Black Documentary Collective and a founding member of Beyond Inclusion.
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon
MODERATOR
Attika Torrence
Attika J. Torrence is a multi-dimensional storyteller with no boundaries. He's won top-tier awards in every field of storytelling he has touched. He is a Television Academy Honors Award-winning, two-time Emmy-nominated producer, a multi-award-winning director and creative director, a Black Authors Festival award-winning author, an African American Literary Awards-winning children's book author, actor, screenplay writer, live event producer and a film industry veteran with over 25 years in the business.
Born and raised in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn and Monrovia, Liberia... Attika attributes his creativity to his diverse, multicultural upbringing on two continents.
Attika Torrence
Andre Brock Jr.
André L. Brock joins the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as an associate professor. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.
Andre Brock Jr.
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, five novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle's DESTROYER and EVE.
His novel, The Changeling, will soon be airing on Apple TV+ starring LaKeith Stanfield.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.
He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University.
Victor LaValle
Saturday, March 28 • 1:30 pm - 3 pm
Climate Change, Restoration of the Planet: Voices from Diasporic Writers
Trymaine Lee
Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, and MSNBC contributor. He is the host of the Into America podcast, where he explores the intersections of race, power, and politics.
For more than two decades, Trymaine has been at the forefront of America’s defining stories—covering natural disasters, racial justice uprisings, and the ongoing struggle for true democracy and equality. He is widely credited as the first national journalist to report on the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a story that helped ignite a nationwide movement. As a national correspondent at MSNBC, he led coverage of the killing of Michael Brown Jr. and the Ferguson uprising that followed, further cementing his role as a leading voice on race and justice in America.
A contributing writer to the acclaimed The 1619 Project, he is also a Webby Award winner for his podcast series on Reconstruction’s unfulfilled promises, a four-time Signal Award winner, and a recipient of the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Blood on Black Wall Street: The Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre, his documentary on the lingering impacts of the massacre 100 years later. His work has earned multiple NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards, four NAACP Image Award nominations, and recognition as Adweek’s Podcast Host of the Year. In 2018, he won an Emmy for his reporting on gun violence in Chicago. Trymaine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as part of The Times-Picayune team covering Hurricane Katrina.
A former fellow at New America and the Harvard Institute of Politics, he has been named to The Root 100 and Ebony Power 100 lists of the most influential African Americans. He’s previously reported for The Philadelphia Tribune, The Trentonian, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book.
Trymaine Lee
MODERATOR
Cebo Campbell
Cebo Campbell is a writer, director, and cultural storyteller whose work moves across books, film, and design. His debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants, became a bestseller and is now being adapted for film in collaboration with Laurence Fishburne’s Cinema Gypsy Productions. Sky Full of Elephants has been longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize, longlisted for the Mark Twain Literary Award, and shortlisted for Crooks Corner prize. Campbell's forthcoming novel, Wells Without Water, sold in a major deal also with Simon and Schuster, continues his commitment to stories that challenge, haunt, and expand how we see ourselves.
Campbell’s projects span original screenplays such as Sweet American Boy, and Qualities of Soil, a short film anthology he intends to direct himself. His work has been described as cinematic and visionary, blending Southern Gothic atmospheres with speculative imagination and a deep commitment to cultural memory.
He is also the founder of UnOthr, a studio and cultural movement dedicated to authored storytelling across literature, film, events, and physical spaces. At its heart, UnOthr is Campbell’s vision of what a cultural brand can be: not inherited, but authored with intention.
Cebo Campbell
Chelsea Mikael Frazier
Chelsea Mikael Frazier, PhD is a Black feminist ecocritic–writing, researching, and teaching at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought. Across all her platforms, her work is dedicated to imagining harmonial worlds that refuse the harm of Black people, the destruction of the environment, and the exploitation of femininity.
She is the founder of Ask An Amazon, an educational consulting platform that supports students, professionals, and organizations in crafting meaningful intellectual and creative legacies. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.
Dr. Frazier is currently at work on her first book manuscript which consults Black women’s art, activism, and storytelling to assemble Black Feminist Ecology: a creative approach and a critical framework for understanding and re-imagining our relationships to our environments. Her interdisciplinary research has been supported by numerous fellowships and awards.
Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier
Natalie Baszile
Natalie Baszile has a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Queen Sugar was named one of the San Francisco Chronicles’ Best Books of 2014, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Natalie has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Djerassi Resident Arts Program where she received the SFFILM and the Bonnie Rattner Fellowships. Her non-fiction work has appeared in Lenny Letter, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus.net and a number of anthologies. For two years, she was Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College where she taught a fiction workshop in the MFA Program. Natalie is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and lives in the Bay Area.
Natalie Baszile
Saturday, March 28 • 4 pm - 5:30 pm
Beyond Banned Books and Censorship of African Diasporic Literature
Abby West
Abby West is the VP, Editorial Director for the Amistad imprint at HarperCollins. She is responsible for the editorial direction of the nearly 40-year-old imprint, including the full list of Zora Neale Hurston books, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and the newly published The Life of Herod the Great. Recent books she’s edited include Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams, My Father’s House: An Ode to America’s Longest Serving Black Congressman by John Conyers III, and I’m Highly Percent Sure by Caroline Wanga. Abby was previously Director of Inclusive Content Programming at Audible and co-founded the Black Employee Network, an Audible ERG. She is a recovering journalist, whose years at prominent media organizations such as Audible, Essence, Entertainment Weekly, and People have given her a love of stories that explore, empower, and celebrate the narratives that can often go untold. She also serves on the board of the Children’s Law Center of New York.
Abby West
MODERATOR
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015),Take My Hand (2022), and most recently Happy Land(2025). Take My Hand was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, NBC News, and elsewhere. The novel was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and named a Top 20 Book of the Year by the Editors at Amazon. It was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Fiction and the 2023 BCALA Award for Fiction. The audiobook version of Take My Hand was named a Best of 2022 by Audible. Happy Land appeared on many "Most Anticipated" lists for 2025, including People, Elle, Reader's Digest, Woman's World, and elsewhere.
The American Bar Association recently awarded Take My Hand its prestigious Silver Gavel Award which recognizes an "outstanding work that fosters the American public's understanding of law and the legal system."
In 2011, Wench was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and in 2017, HarperCollins released Wench as one of eight "Olive Titles," limited edition modern classics that included books by Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Dolen has established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life. In 2013, she wrote the introduction to a special edition of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, published by Simon & Schuster, which became a New York Times bestseller. She followed that with an introduction to Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, published in 2016, and the forthcoming 75th anniversary of George Orwell's 1984 which will be published by Penguin Random House in 2023.
Dolen is a three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Dr. Ayo Sekai
Dr. Ayo Sekai stands as a force in academia, a change maker and champion for intellectual rigor, and the amplification of Black scholarship. With more than a decade of experience as a civil servant, she has held senior leadership roles across several federal agencies. Harnessing over 20 years of influence and authority in publishing, she is the visionary Founder, CEO, and Publisher of Universal Write Publications, LLC (UWP), a beacon for transformative, peer-reviewed works by Black scholars, amplifying the collaborative power of allyship, and community. Earning her PhD in Political Science with specializations in Black Politics and International Relations from Howard University, Sekai honed her expertise on Linguistic Imperialism. Her groundbreaking research interrogates language structures that perpetuate systemic racism and dismantles oppressive narratives that inform Public Policy, Legislature, and Politics. As the author of A2: A Scholarly Poetical Science Discourse, the PSD method, her career is marked by excellence and an unwavering commitment with a mantra of integrity to “Do No Harm.” She is not merely a leader; she is an ethos of her own. She is a movement. A dynamic blend of scholar, author, publisher, and advocate, redefining the boundaries of academic discourse with uncompromising brilliance.
Dr. Ayo Sekai
Krishan Trotman
Krishan Trotman is the Vice-President, Publisher of Legacy Lit. She joined Hachette Books in 2016. In 2020 she launched Legacy Lit, an imprint dedicated to books that give voice to issues, authors, and communities that have been marginalized, underserved, and overlooked. This includes BIPOC authors, all women, and any group that they believe deserves a spotlight. The imprint is committed to promoting equality, equity, and inclusion for all people.
Her authors have included a range of award-winning and New York Times bestsellers, including congressman John Lewis’ Across That Bridge; journalist Stephanie Land’s Maid; MSNBC political analyst Malcolm Nance’s The Plot to Destroy Democracy; New York Times columnist Lindy West’s The Witches Are Coming and Shit Actually; Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad’s Proud; radio and TV host Zerlina Maxwell’s The End of White Politics; TV personality Ed Gordon’s Conversations in Black; journalist Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords; Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’ memoir Nothing Personal; BRAVO’s Million Dollar Listing star Ryan Serhant’s Sell It Like Serhant and Big Money Energy; Morning Joe’s co-host Mika Brzezinski’s Earn It! and Comeback Careers; The Today Show’s cohost Al Roker’s Recipe’s to Live By; MSNBC producer Daniela Pierre Bravo’s Earn It! And The Other; attorney and media personality Eboni K. Williams’ Bet on Black; former CEO of BET’s I am Debra Lee; grief expert Marisa Renee Lee’s Grief is Love, and Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad’s Proud, former White House Social Secretary Deesha Dyer’s Undiplomatic; NBC correspondent Antonia Hylton’s Madness; journalist David Montero’s The Stolen Wealth of Slavery with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, scholar Philip V. McHarris’ Beyond Policing, NAACP Image Award winner and sociologist Karida Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind, former Social Secretary of Education to the U.S. John King’s Teacher By Teacher, to name a few.
Trotman is the co-author of the Queens of the Resistance series. She was recently celebrated in the New York Times and Essence magazine as one of the few African American publishing executives. New York magazine called her as one of Publishing’s New Power Club. Trotman has been featured in the New York Times, Essence Magazine, New York Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Shondaland, Cheddar TV, MSN, CSPAN, and more. She is a Baldwin of the Arts fellow. Trotman is an active speaker including a keynote in 2024 for City College of New York and the American Society of Journalist and Authors. She has also spoken at numerous writing conferences and book festivals, including New York University, Girls Write Now, The Center for Black Literature, and more. She resides in New Jersey with her son.
Krishan Trotman
Saturday, March 28 • 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Plenary Discussion with Honorees on Conference Theme
and the National Black Writers Conference Awards Ceremony
Lurie Daniel Favors
As the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors Show on SiriusXM’s Urban View channel 126, Ms. Daniel Favors brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise on racial and social justice to the airwaves.
Ms. Daniel Favors started her legal career as an attorney in the New York offices of Proskauer Rose LLP and Manatt Phelps and Phillips, LLP. She also served as a federal court law clerk in the chambers of the Honorable Sterling Johnson, Jr., in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She later founded Daniel Favors Law PLLC, a law firm that focused on economic and racial justice.
Before completing law school, she co-founded Sankofa Community Empowerment, Inc., a non-profit organization designed to educate and empower communities of African descent. She later co-founded Breaking the Cycle Consulting Services LLC, which specializes in creating comprehensive professional development for educators, youth education programs and family engagement workshops designed to address the crisis in urban education through the use of culturally responsive teaching.
Ms. Daniel Favors is a contributing author to The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement. She has also penned Afro State of Mind: Memories of a Nappy Headed Black Girl, a coming of age story about a Black girl fighting to find her place in a world where her hair texture and skin color did not fit the accepted beauty standard. Through an examination of the history of African textured hair and racism, Ms. Daniel Favors identifies Black hair, identity, skin color and self-esteem as areas that are ripe with potential for personal and political power.
Ms. Daniel Favors adheres to the West African principle of sankofa and believes one must use the past in order to understand the present and build for a brighter future.
Lurie Daniel Favors
MODERATOR
Kassahun Checole
Kassahun Checole, president and publisher of Africa World Press and The Red Sea Press, formerly taught at Rutgers University and El Colegio de Mexico. Checole is the recipient of many academic honors and equally numerous recognitions for his activist work. In January 2000 he served as one of the organizers of the first international conference in independent Eritrea, “Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures in the 21st Century.”
Kassahun Checole
Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written five collections of poetry, including America, A Love Story, Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Camille Dungy
Imani Perry
Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of “South to America” and seven other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Massachusetts with her two sons. Her recent book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” is featured in the 2025 National Book Festival.
Imani Perry
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