Featured Participants of the 17th National Black Writers Conference
All That We Carry: Where Do We Go From Here?
These esteemed writers will gather at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn
Wednesday, March 20 to Saturday, March 23, 2024
Honorees
Paul Coates
W. Paul Coates is the founder and director of Black Classic Press, which specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent.
Born in West Philadelphia, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. Coates later received his B.A. degree in community development from the Homestead Montebello Center of Antioch University in Baltimore, Maryland.
After he returned from Vietnam, Coates settled in Baltimore, Maryland and began volunteering for the community breakfast program organized by the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, Coates became defense captain of the Baltimore Black Panthers, where he oversaw the management of all Panther activities in Maryland, including implementing free clothing and free food programs and housing assistance, before leaving the organization in 1971. He subsequently established the George Jackson Prison Movement to bring Afrocentric literature to inmates. By 1978, the program had transitioned into the Black Classic Press (BCP), which Coates founded to publish books by and about people of African descent. After receiving his MLS degree from Clark Atlanta University, Coates joined the staff at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and was instrumental in the establishment of the Black Panther Party Archives at Howard University.
A leader in the field of small publishers, Coates founded BCP Digital Printing in 1995 to produce books and documents using digital print technology.
Coates is co-editor of Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (Howard University Press, 1990). He formerly owned and operated The Black Book (1972-1978), a Baltimore-based bookstore. His experience with the purchase, sale and collection, and publishing of books by and about Blacks is a love affair that has continued for more than three decades.
Coates is the father of nine children: Kelly, Jonathan, Malik, Menelik, Ta-Nehisi, Darius, Jared, Damani and Kristance, including two additional adult children through marriage.
Paul Coates
Percival Everett
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections, including James (2024), Dr. No (2022); The Trees (2021), which won the 2022 Ainisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize; Telephone (2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in fiction; So Much Blue (2017); Glyph (2014); Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013); I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009); and Erasure (2001). All are published by Graywolf Press. Erasure has been used as the basis of the 2023 studio release of the Oscar-winning film American Fiction starring Jeffrey Wright. Everett won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Dos Passos Prize, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, The 2010 Believer Book Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, a Creative Capital Award, and BS the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories, and they are often featured on Selected Shorts, a radio program aired on NPR from Symphony Space in NYC. In 1989, he was invited to address the South Carolina State Legislature, but during his speech refused to continue because of the presence of the Confederate flag, thus touching off a controversy that ended with the flag being removed from the Capitol building some years later. He was inspired by this experience to write his powerful and funny story, The Appropriation of Cultures.
Everett is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.
Percival Everett
Peniel E. Joseph
Peniel E. Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. Prior to joining the UT faculty, Joseph was a professor at Tufts University, where he founded the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people’s lives.
Joseph’s most recent book is The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. 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 and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His book Stokely: A Life, has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power.” Joseph’s other book credits include the editing of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.
Peniel E. Joseph
Bernice McFadden
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels including Praise Song for the Butterflies (which was long-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize in Fiction), Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), Glorious, and The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the BCALA. McFadden is also an essayist and short story writer and has written five novels of humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday.
Her most recent novel, Glorious, is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty. Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.
McFadden is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Over the years, she has been a featured guest speaker at the Center for Black Literature’s National Black Writers Conference.
Bernice McFadden
Key Speakers
Jennifer Nicole Baker
Jennifer is a publishing professional with over 20 years’ experience in a range of roles (editorial, production, media) and is an instructor for Bay Path University’s Creative Nonfiction MFA, as well as the creator/host of the podcast Minorities in Publishing. Jennifer was named the 2019 Publishers Weekly Star Watch “SuperStar” because her “varied work championing diversity in publishing has made her an indispensable fixture in the book business.” Her essay What We Aren’t was also listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. Her short story The Pursuit of Happiness was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2017 by Newtown Literary Journal and is featured in the anthology What God Is Honored Here? Jennifer is the editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology with Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster). Her YA novel Forgive Me Not was published in August 2023 with Nancy Paulsen Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House).
Jennifer Nicole Baker
Jasmine Claude-Narcisse
Jasmine Claude-Narcisse is assistant professor of Francophone and Creole Haitian Studies at York College, CUNY. Her research encompasses the rhetoric of the self in Haitian Francophone literature, Francophone Caribbean autobiography, Race and Identity politics, Translation theory and practicum, Caribbean post-coloniality, and Human Rights.
For over twelve years she led the Haitian Book Centre and curated the annual Haitian Book Day in New York, sponsored by York College. As an assistant to the director of the Henri Peyre French Institute, CUNY and then a member of its Board of Directors, she spearheaded the Institute’s continuous programming on Haiti, including the Haiti Rencontres series in 2012, and the three-year seminar Impunity, Responsibility and Citizenship – HAITI that culminated with a three-day international conference in March 2016. Currently a member of the scientific committee of the academic Haitian History Journal, Dr. Claude-Narcisse is actively involved in the work of the collective Jean-Claude Charles which aims to revisit and promote his contribution to literature and global thought through conferences, symposia and publication of critical apparatus of his oeuvre. She is working on a critical translation of the essay Le corps noir of Jean-Claude Charles.
Dr. Claude-Narcisse is also the President of Haiti Futur US, a non-profit organization offering support to schools in disadvantaged areas of Haiti.
Jasmine Claude-Narcisse
Michael Eric Dyson
Michael Eric Dyson is a distinguished professor, gifted writer, and prominent media personality. He has taught at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, including Princeton, Brown, and Georgetown, and is currently Centennial Chair and University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Dyson has authored more than 25 books, including seven New York Times bestsellers that include books on Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye, Bill Cosby, and Barack Obama. His book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, was described by The New York Times as “an interpretive miracle” and was a finalist for the 2016 Kirkus Prize.
Dyson’s New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America was called by the New York Times “one of the most frank and searing discussions on race” and was a finalist for the 2018 Southern Book Prize. His book What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin and Our Unfinished Conversation on Race in America was named by the Washington Post as one of the “50 notable works of nonfiction in 2018.”
He has won numerous awards for his literary achievements, including the 2020 Langston Hughes Medal, the American Book Award, and two NAACP Image Awards.
In addition to his academic and writing pursuits, Dr. Dyson is a leading public intellectual, known for his thought-provoking insights on race, social justice, and contemporary culture.
Michael Eric Dyson is a frequent guest on television and radio programs, where he shares his insights and expertise on various topics related to race, politics, and culture. From appearances on news programs to interviews on podcasts, Dyson is a sought-after voice in the media. He is also a previous Center for Black Literature National Black Writers Conference honoree.
Michael Eric Dyson
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010), The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2011), and Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011). Griffiths’ recent collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image award. Random House published her recent debut novel Promise.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Cheryl Hudson
Author, publisher, and entrepreneur, Cheryl Willis Hudson has more than four dozen years of experience in the children's book industry. A native of Portsmouth, Virginia, and a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, Cheryl began her career doing text book design for publishers such as Houghton Mifflin and Macmillan.
Noticing a lack of quality Black-interest books for her own two children, in 1988, Cheryl and her husband Wade formed Just Us Books, Inc., a publishing company that specializes in children’s books that focus on Black history, culture, and experiences. Cheryl’s first book, AFRO-BETS ABC Book, was Just Us Books’ first published title.
Hudon has authored more than 25 books for young children including Bright Eyes, Brown Skin; Many Colors of Mother Goose; Come By Here Lord: Everyday Prayers for Children - all published by Just Us Books, and many others. She and her husband Wade edited We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, and The Talk: Conversations About Race, Love & Truth, acclaimed anthologies and joint projects between Just Us Books and Crown Books/Random House. Brave.Black. First. 50+ African-American Women Who Changed the World is her most recent publication.
Hudson has received many honors in recognition of her contribution to children's literature, including the 2019 Children's Book Council's Diversity Award, 2019 Jane Addams Honor Book Award, the Hurston-Wright Foundation's Madam C. J. Walker Award, and the Ida B. Wells Institution Leadership Award from the Center for Black Literature.
Cheryl Hudson
Christopher Jackson
Chris Jackson is the publisher and editor-in-chief of One World, an imprint of Random House. From 2006 to 2016, he was executive editor of Spiegel and Grau before becoming head of One World. He is the editor of a wide range of award-winning and bestselling authors, including Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jill Leovy, Trevor Noah, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Valarie Kaur, and Eddie Huang. His own writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Atlantic.com, and other outlets. Over his career, Chris has published a wide range of bestselling and award-winning authors. He is the recipient of the Center for Fiction Medal for Editorial Excellence, the Authors Guild Publisher Award for Literature that Inspires Change, and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop Editorial Achievement Award.
Over the years, Jackson has been a guest speaker at the Center for Black Literature’s National Black Writers Conference
Christopher Jackson
Wesley Lowery
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and on-air correspondent. He is the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a non-profit newsroom based at American University. He is also a contributing editor at The Marshall Project and a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. In nearly a decade as a national correspondent, Lowery has specialized in issues of race, justice and law enforcement. He led the Washington Post team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 for the creation and analysis of a real-time database to track fatal police shootings in the United States. His project, “Murder with Impunity,” is an unprecedented look at unsolved homicides in major American cities, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. His first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, was a New York Times bestseller and awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose by the LA Times Book Prizes. His second book, American Whitelash, was released in June 2023 and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Wesley Lowery
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of racism, economic inequality, criminal justice, and democracy in U.S. History. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the Journal of American History, and contributor to a National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014). He is also the award-winning author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize from the American Studies Association in 2011. He is currently co-directing a National Academy of Sciences study on reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.
Giban’s writing and scholarship have been featured in national print and broadcast media outlets, such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, The Nation, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Moyers and Company, MSNBC, and The New York Times.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Kevin Powell
Kevin Powell is a writer, human and civil rights activist and one of America's most celebrated political, cultural, literary, and hip-hop voices. Powell is also a 2024 GRAMMY-nominated poet, journalist, and the author of 16 books, including When We Free The World, a short essay collection about freedom, justice, and equality in America; his critically acclaimed autobiography, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood, which is being adapted for the screen, and his most recent The Kevin Powell Reader: Essential Writings and Conversations.
Powell has penned articles, essays, and blogs for a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and major websites, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Nation, NPR, ESPN, ESSENCE, EBONY, Rolling Stone, Esquire, HuffPost, Utne Reader, The Guardian, The Baffler, The Progressive, Complex, and British GQ.
He has traveled, worked, and lectured in all 50 American states and five of the world’s seven continents. He is directing, writing, and producing his first documentary film, When We Free The World, about healthy versus toxic manhood and fathers and sons. He is the playwright of an upcoming stage play based on his writings, speeches, and conversations about what it is to be a man.
Over the years, Powell has been a featured guest speaker at the National Black Conference and at Center for Black Literature public programs.
Photo by Evangeline Lawson
Kevin Powell
Tracy Sherrod
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes Of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and, most recently, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), which was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a Best of 2023 by The New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and Glamour. Currently pursuing her Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part New York Times essay series “Imprinted By Belief.”
Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.
Tracy Sherrod
Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were New York Times bestsellers. She also authored the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her most recent novel, Remember Us, is set in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–2019. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Woodson is also the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim.
The MacArthur Foundation describes Jacqueline Woodson’s work as follows: “In nearly thirty publications that span picture books, young adult novels, and poetry, Woodson crafts stories about Black children, teenagers, and families that evoke the hopefulness and power of human connection even as they tackle difficult issues such as the history of slavery and segregation ...”
Woodson is a previous Center for Black Literature National Black Writers Conference honoree.
Jacqueline Woodson
Regina Brooks
Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency in New York, New York. Her agency is the largest African American-owned agency in the country and has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Her authors have appeared in USA Today, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as on Oprah, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSBNC, TV One, BET, and a host of other media outlets. Writer’s Digest Magazine named Serendipity as one of the top 25 literary agencies. Formerly, Brooks held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons and McGraw-Hill. She is the author of Writing Great Books for Young Adults: Everything You Need to Know, from Crafting the Idea to Getting Published (Sourcebooks), and You Should Really Write a Book: How to Write, Sell, and Market Your Memoir (St. Martin’s Press). Brooks is also a well-received blogger for the Huffington Post.
Regina Brooks
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is an award-winning author of Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; Claire of the Sea Light, and The Art of Death. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, The Beacon Best of 2000, Haiti Noir, Haiti Noir 2, and Best American Essays 2011. She has written seven books for children and young adults; a travel narrative, After the Dance; and a collection of essays, Create Dangerously. Her most recent book is Everything Inside: Stories, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and the 2020 Vilcek Prize in Literature.
Danticat is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and is currently the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Danticat is a previous Center for Black Literature National Black Writers Conference honoree.
Edwidge Danticat
W. B. Garvey
W. B. Garvey is a relative of the famous pan-Africanist and Jamaican National Hero, Marcus Garvey. He is the author of White Gold and Panama Fever: Digging Down Gold Mountain. His new and critically acclaimed novel, Independence Blues, draws on his early life in Los Angeles and stories of his parent's experiences in the United States and Canada from 1946 through 1963. A classically trained violinist, Mr. Garvey has performed as a soloist with renowned symphony orchestras and as a recitalist in major U.S. concert halls. Garvey has played for over a hundred film scores including Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence, Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo, and Spike Lee's Malcolm X. His writing has appeared in several publications including the Killens Review of Arts & Letters. A University of Southern California graduate, Garvey now resides and writes in Phoenix, Arizona.
W. B. Garvey
Donna Hill
Donna Hill began her career in 1987 writing short stories for confession magazines. Since that time, she has had more than 100 published titles to her credit since her first novel was released in 1990, and she is considered one of the early pioneers of the African American romance genre. Three of her novels have been adapted for television. She has been featured in ESSENCE, the New York Daily News, USA Today, Today’s Black Woman, and Black Enterprise, among many others. She has received numerous awards for her body of work—which crosses several genres-- including The Career Achievement Award, the first recipient of The Trailblazer Award, The Zora Neale Hurston Literary Award, and The Gold Pen Award, among others. She has also received commendations for her community service. As an editor, she has packaged several highly successful novels and anthologies, two of which were nominated for awards.
Her novel Confessions In B-Flat, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and is being adapted for the screen and executive produced by Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer. Her latest novel is I Am Ayah—The Way Home. It also received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and parts of it was compared to elements in Octavia Butler’s Kindred by Kirkus Reviews.
Hill is a graduate of Goddard College with an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently in pursuit of her Doctor of Arts in English Pedagogy and Technology. She is an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at Medgar Evers College and lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her family. Hill has been a supporter of the Center for Black Literature since its inception. She is the former Interim Direct of Literary Programs for the Center and is a frequent guest speaker at the National Black Writers Conference. | www.donnaohill.com
Donna Hill
Wade Hudson
From Mr. Hudson: "I was born to write. My career as a writer took root when I was a boy growing up in the small town of Mansfield, Louisiana.
In 1988, my love of writing helped serve as the foundation for Just Us Books, a company I founded with his wife Cheryl, to publish children’s books that reflect the fullness of Black stories, history, culture, and experiences. Some of our company’s first published titles were ones I wrote, including Book of Black Heroes from A to Z and Jamal's Busy Day, illustrated by George Ford. I also co-edited with Cheryl books that Just Us Books produced in partnership with other publishers, including How Sweet the Sound in collaboration with Scholastic...
My most recent titles are The Reckoning, a middle grade novel, and Invincible: Fathers and Mothers of Black America, a picture book illustrated by E.B. Lewis, that celebrates courageous Black forefathers and foremothers who helped to shape Black America. This is history that deserves a bigger spotlight, and which is often the biggest inspiration for my writing...
In addition to writing and serving as CEO of Just Us Books, I speak at schools, libraries, and industry conferences across the nation, and for a number of years my wife Cheryl and I conducted workshops for Freedom Schools, operated nationwide by the Children’s Defense...
I have been honored to receive many awards for my contributions, including the Ida B. Wells Institutional Leadership Award (2008) presented by the Center for Black Literature..."
Wade Hudson
Patricia Spear Jones
Arkansas-born Patricia Spears Jones has lived and worked in New York City since 1974. She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist and was appointed New York State Poet (2023-25). She is the recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the author of The Beloved Community, A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, three full-length collections, and five chapbooks. At the Rauschenberg Residency, she published Collapsing Forrest City, Photo Giclée. Her poems are widely anthologized, in volumes including: 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today; WORD: An Anthology A Gathering of the Tribes; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poets. in The New Yorker. She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). Her plays “Mother” and “Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting were commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines.
As Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Spears Jones created WORDS Sunday series. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and at Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence. She has also taught poetry workshops for the Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts, and at the CBL Wild Seeds Writers Retreat for Medgar Evers College. Spears Jones is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress.
Patricia Spears Jones
Lisa Lucas
Lisa Lucas is the Senior Vice President & Publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books at Penguin Random House. Previously, Lucas was the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation for five years. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as the Publisher of Guernica, a non-profit online magazine focusing on writing that explores the intersection of art and politics with an international and diverse focus. Prior to that, she served as Director of Education at the Tribeca Film Institute, on the development team at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and as a consultant for the Sundance Institute, San Francisco Film Society, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and ReelWorks Teen Filmmaking. Lucas also serves on the literary council of the Brooklyn Book Festival. Find her on Twitter at @likaluca.
Lisa Lucas
Victoria Christopher Murray
Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of more than 30 novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies. Both novels were co-written with Marie Benedict. Originally self-published, her first novel, Temptation, was eventually published by Time-Warner. Temptation remained on the ESSENCE bestsellers list for nine consecutive months and in 2001, it received the NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Literature.
Victoria has received numerous awards including the Phillis Wheatley Trailblazer Award, the Delta Sigma Theta Osceola Award for Excellence in the Arts, Go On Girl Book Club Author of the Year, eleven African American Literary Awards and five NAACP Image Award nominations. In 2016, she won the Image Award for Outstanding Literature for her social commentary novel, Stand Your Ground. In addition to being a New York Times Bestseller, The Personal Librarian was a Good Morning America Book Club selection and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. The First Ladies was Target's 2023 Book of the Year.
Five of Murray's Seven Deadly Sins novels have been made into Lifetime movies produced by TD Jakes, Shaun Robinson and Derrick Williams. The Personal Librarian has been optioned by Al Roker Entertainment to become a mini-series. With almost three million books in print, Victoria is one of the country's top African American contemporary authors.
Victoria Christopher Murray
Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her most recent work is Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against the Apocalypse, a memoir on race, climate, and environmental justice. Her previous books are Searching for Zion (2013), the winner of an American Book Award and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel The Professor's Daughter (2005). She is a contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Raboteau's essays have appeared and been anthologized in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists' New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY). She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.
Emily Raboteau
A. J. Verdelle
Writing is A.J. Verdelle’s second career, or third, depending on how you count. When The Good Negress was published in 1995, it won five national prizes—including from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, the American Library Association, and finalist prizes at the Los Angeles Times, the IMPAC/Dublin Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. The Good Negress has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, which is rare, and is used as a novel text in colleges and universities nationally. The book is currently in its 17th paperback printing. On publication, Toni Morrison called Verdelle’s novel “truly extraordinary.”
Verdelle’s most recent work is Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison, a testimony in praise and consideration of Toni Morrison, who mentored Verdelle.
Verdelle has been a writer and a working mother for twenty-five years. She teaches creative writing to undergraduate students at Morgan State University in Baltimore and teaches graduate students in the MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
A. J. Verdelle
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is the author of many articles and books that include She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power; 1619 to 1969; Race, Law; and American Society: 1607 to Present; The Voting Rights War; and The Constitution: Major Cases and Conflicts. She is also a playwright of eight produced plays. Recently, her virtual Zoom staged readings of SHOT: Caught a Soul and Dreams of Emmett Till were chosen as official selections at film festivals. Her screenplay Sgt. Freeman was a finalist as well as an official selection at national and international film festivals.
Browne-Marshall is a tenured Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College (CUNY). She is the recipient of many awards including an Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School Fellowship, Pulitzer Center grant, Wiley College Woman of Excellence Award, NAACP Service Award, Emerging Screenwriter Award, and Frederick Lewis Allen Fellowship. She has appeared in several documentary films and speaks nationally and internationally about her books and issues of social justice.
Over the years, Browne-Marshal has been a guest speaker at the Center for Black Literature’s National Black Writers Conference.
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction,
criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press,
UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna
Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the
Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book
Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a
Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award
for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the
Government of Jamaica.
From Blue Flower Arts.com
Kwame Dawes
Marita Golden
Marita Golden is an award-winning author of over 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, a master teacher of writing, coach, mentor, and a literary and creative writing consultant. Golden works with writers to help them skillfully and powerfully tell their story. In her workshops, her coaching, and manuscript evaluation she enables writers to write in their most authentic, creative, and personal literary voice. She served as a faculty member in the MFA Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and at Johns Hopkins University and was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the District of Columbia and Prince George’s Community College. She has lectured and taught internationally at universities in Israel, Turkey, and Spain and at over 80 colleges and universities in the States, including Columbia College, Medgar Evers College, Brandeis University, Bethune-Cookman University, and Vanderbilt University.
Her articles and essays have been published in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Essence, and The Root.
Golden’s many awards include the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets and Writers, Distinguished Service Award from the Authors Guild, Maryland Author Award from the Association of Maryland Librarians, Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and induction into the International Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.
As a literary activist, she co-founded the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation with Clyde McElvene, which has supported the international community of Black writers for three decades.
Marita Golden
Marc Lamont Hill
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.
He is currently the host of BET News, The Grio, Al Jazeera UpFront, and the Coffee & Books podcast.
Dr. Hill is a Presidential Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he teaches courses in Anthropology, Urban Education, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author or co-author of eight books, including the award-winning Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life; Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility; Except For Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics; and Schooling Against The Prison. His current research and writing explore the relationships between race, culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.
An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Marc Lamont Hill
Karen Hunter
Karen Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, professor, publisher and “change
agent,” according to Essence magazine, which named her one of the “Woke100” of 2018. She was also selected to the 2020 Ebony magazine’s Power 100 List. As a writer, Karen has co-authored eight New York Times bestsellers. As CEO of Karen Hunter Publishing, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, she published more than 35 books, including No. 1 NYT bestseller True You by pop icon Janet Jackson, as well as bestsellers with Kris Jenner and E. Lynn Harris. Karen has been named one of the 100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts in America by industry bible Talkers Magazine every year since 2015. A New Jersey native, a Drew University graduate, Karen has been a full-time professor and Distinguished Lecturer in the Film & Media Department at Hunter College in New York City since 2004.
In 2020, during the pandemic, Karen launched Knarrative.com, which is home to the
largest Africana Studies classroom in the world. She is also founder of thehub.news and
theglobalmajority.com.
Karen Hunter
Thabiti Lewis
Thabiti Lewis is a professor of English and interim associate vice chancellor of academic affairs at Washington State University, Vancouver. He is also the editor of Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara and Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America.
Lewis has published widely in the areas of American literature, masculinity, African American Studies, and popular culture (music and sports). His essay “The 1921 Tulsa Massacre – What Happened to Black Wall Street,” co-authored with Kweku Larry Crowe, was published in the Winter 2021 edition of HUMANITIES, The Magazine for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lewis is completing a book-length study about the liberation impulse that informs the art of the politics in the fiction of the writer Toni Cade Bambara and is working on a study of the performance of heroism and the making of gender and race within four American sports museum spaces.
Thabiti Lewis
Stéphane Martelly
Writer, painter and scholar, Stéphane Martelly was born in Port-au-Prince and now lives in Montreal. Through a profoundly transdisciplinary approach, she confronts theory, critical reflection, and art in her work. She has published poetry [La Boîte noire suivi de Départs 2004)] and children's tales [Couleur de rue, 1999 and L'Homme aux cheveux de fougère, 2002]. Her pictorial works are showcased in the digital art book Folie passée à la chaux vive (Madness spent in quicklime) (Publie.net, 2010).
Her scholarly work notably includes working in the Montreal based Life Stories Of Montrealers Displaced By War, Genocide And Other Human Rights Violations as a researcher and coordinator. She also wrote a monography on Haitian poet Magloire-Saint-Aude (Le Sujet opaque, 2001) and several articles on Caribbean literature.
Her recent publications include Inventaires (Triptyque, 2016) and L'enfant gazelle (Remue-Ménage, 2018) and Little Girl Gazelle (2020) Martelly is an Affiliate Professor in the Theatre Department and Main Coordinator for the Centre of Oral History and Digital Storytelling, at Concordia University. Her continuing interest remains the possibility and limits of creation and interpretation.
Stéphane Martelly
Pamela Newkirk
Author, journalist, and professor Pamela Newkirk is a multifaceted scholar who has published a variety of works: Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, A Love No Less and Letters from Black America, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, and her most recent book, Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Industry, present multidimensional portraits of African American life.
In 1990, she was awarded the International Reporting Award from the New York Association of Black Journalists. In 1992, Pamela received a Pulitzer Prize as a part of the New York Newsday reporting team for Spot News for coverage of a fatal subway crash. In 1993 Pamela joined the faculty at New York University and continued contributing articles to numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, Artnews, ESSENCE, and civil rights blog, The Defenders Online.
She is the extremely proud mother of Marjani and Mykel Nairne and lives in New York City with her husband Michael and dog Miso.
Pamela Newkirk
Jason Reynolds
Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, All American Boys (with Brendan Kiely), Long Way Down, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (with Ibram X. Kendi), Stuntboy, in the Meantime (illustrated by Raúl the Third), and Ain’t Burned All the Bright (with artwork by Jason Griffin). The recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, an NAACP Image Award, and multiple Coretta Scott King honors, Reynolds is also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, and various media outlets. He is on faculty at Lesley University, in the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC.
Jason Reynolds
Renée Watson
Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of children’s literature. Over the past decade, she has authored more than fifteen books for young readers, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor for Piecing Me Together, and high praise for the picture book, 1619 Project: Born on the Water. Her picture book, Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills (Random House Books for Young Readers, 2012), received several honors, including an NAACP Image Award nomination in children’s literature.
Watson is a member of the Academy of American Poets' Education Advisory Council. She was a writer in residence for more than twenty years, teaching creative writing and theater in public schools and community centers throughout the nation. She founded I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit housed in Langston Hughes's home from 2016 to 2019. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is also a writer in residence in the Solstice low-residency creative writing program at Pine Manor College.
Renée Watson
Kalisha Buckhanon
Kalisha Buckhanon’s most recent novel is Running to Fall. Her novels Speaking of Summer, Solemn, Conception, and Upstate are honored by the American Library Association, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Friends of American Writers, and more. Kalisha’s stories, essays, and books cross generations and genres, but all remain centered on African Americans, women, love, and justice. Upstate was selected as an inaugural National Book Foundation “Literature for Justice” title.
Kalisha was an on-air commentator for true crime cases involving women from 2014-2018 on BET, ID, and TV One. She has been a guest of the Center for Black Literature’s Writers on Writing radio show and the Killens Reading Series. Her work is reviewed widely in media such as ESSENCE, The Guardian, People, Time, and O Magazine. | www.Kalisha.com
Kalisha Buckhanon
Patrick Dougher
Bio forthcoming.
Patrick Dougher
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies. She is the author or editor of eight books including Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013); and Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her most recent work is In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (W.W. Norton, 2023).
Griffin collaborated with composer, pianist, Geri Allen, and director and actor S. Epatha Merkerson on two theatrical projects, for which she wrote the book. The first was “Geri Allen and Friends Celebrate the Great Jazz Women of the Apollo.” The second was “A Conversation with Mary Lou” featuring vocalist Carmen Lundy. Griffin is a 2021-22 Guggenheim Fellow and Mellon Foundation Fellow in Residence.
Griffin, a long-time supporter of the Center for Black Literature and has been a guest speaker at the Center for Black Literature’s National Black Writers Conference.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American writer, performer, and educator. His writing has been published in English, Spanish, and French in literary journals, anthologies, and other books worldwide and online. He also writes for the stage. Most of his writing centers on love, family, race, immigration, and joy.
Holnes is a professor at Medgar Evers College, CUNY and has long served as a National Black Writers Conference steering committee member and has also been a guest speaker.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Yahdon Israel
Yahdon Israel, a senior editor at Simon and Schuster, is an educator, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books cool. The Literaryswag Book Club, a Brooklyn-based subscription service and book club, meets every last Wednesday of the month. He is the former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Magazine and has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, LitHub, Poets & Writers, and Vanity Fair.
Israel teaches creative writing at The New School and City College of the City University of New York. He has also served as a preliminary reader for both the Whiting Award and the Aspen Words Literary Award and has worked extensively with the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Yahdon Israel
Bettina Love
Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of the New York Times bestseller Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate. A co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities, she has overseen over $250,000 in grants to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the Task Force that launched the program In Her Hands, one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S., which has distributed more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. She is also the author of the bestseller We Want To Do More Than Survive. Dr. Love has also provided commentary for various news outlets including NPR, PBS, Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Time, Ed Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Bettina Love
Tiya Miles
Tiya Miles is the author of seven books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest history, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2022 Cundill History Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other scholarly works include: The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, Ties That Bind, and the forthcoming Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. Miles publishes essays in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and other media outlets, and she has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Native intersectional past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Miles’s newest book is her debut time-bridge novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South and based on historical events. She was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.
Tiya Miles
Patrice Nganang
Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His novel Mount Pleasant was translated into many languages, including Norwegian, German, and Arabic. He is also the author of Dog Days, an award-winning novel telling the story of a people’s struggle for more freedom, which has also been translated into many languages. His historical trilogy about Cameroon includes A Trail of Crab Tracks (2022), and the previous novels Mount Pleasant (2011) and When the Plums Are Ripe (2013).
Nganang states that, as a scholar, he investigates the diverse ramifications of violence. He is particularly interested in what is commonly referred to as the "colonial archive" (pictures, books, instruments). He has published and lectured extensively on numerous topics related to postcolonial African literature, theatres, and cultures.
For the last twenty years of his career, he has navigated three continents as a writer and a professor, starting in Germany. He is currently a Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Stonybrook University.
Patrice Nganang
Diane Richards
Diane Richards, playwright, performer, and producer, serves as Executive Director of the Harlem Writers Guild, the world's oldest, continuously operating African American Writers Guild. Her play, Sowa’s Red Gravy, was produced in 2012 by Woodie King Jr. of the New Federal Theater and starred Tony Award-nominated actress Lonette McKee. The New York Times called it “an irresistible, lusty celebration of passions.” Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Beloved Harlem: A Literary Tribute to Black America’s Most Famous Neighborhood, ESSENCE Magazine, and the Harlem Writers Guild Press. In 2015, she co-produced Amiri Baraka’s final play—Most Dangerous Man in America -- based on the life of W.E.B. Dubois. Her debut novel, Ella, a reimagining of the life of Ella Fitzgerald, will be published in May 2024.
Over the years, Richards has been a guest speaker for various programs for the Center for Black Literature.
Diane Richards
Jamia Wilson
Jamia is an award-winning feminist activist, writer, speaker, and podcaster. She joined Random House as vice president and executive editor in 2021. As the former director of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York and the former VP of programs at the Women’s Media Center, Jamia has been a leading voice on women’s rights issues for over a decade. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, The Today Show, CNN, Elle, BBC, Rookie, Refinery 29, Glamour, Teen Vogue, and The Washington Post. She is the author of This Book Is Feminist, Young, Gifted, and Black, the introduction and oral history in Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World; Step Into Your Power: 23 Lessons on How to Live Your Best Life; Big Ideas for Young Thinkers; ABC's of AOC, and the co-author of Roadmap for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Advocacy, and Activism for All. Jamia is passionate about mission-driven organizations and serves on the Omega Institute, ERA Coalition and Center for Reproductive Rights boards, and the St. Timothy’s School Advisory Council. She is also the co-host of the second season of the Anthem Award-winning podcast, Ordinary Equality.
Jamia Wilson
Poets
Anastacia-Reneé
Anastacia-Reneé is an award-winning cross-genre queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDX speaker and former Seattle Civic Poet. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist, (v.), and Forget It. Her mixed media art has been exhibited at the Fry Art Museum and her installation, “Don’t Be Absurd (Alice in Parts),” was chosen by NBC as one of the “Queer Artist of Color Must See LGBTQ Arts Shows.” She has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Artist Trust, Ragdale, Mineral School and others. Renee’’s poetry, fiction and nonfiction has been anthologized and published widely. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Anastacia-Reneé
Reginald Harris
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, Reginald Harris won the 2012 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. His first book, 10 Tongues, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and websites, including African-American Review, Sou’wester, Of Poetry and Protest: Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, and This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. He and his partner live in Brooklyn. (Instagram: @reginald.harris)
Reginald Harris
Linda Susan Jackson
Linda Susan Jackson is the author of Truth Be Told (Four Way Books) and What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press), a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Paterson Prize. She has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Calabash International Literary Festival, Soul Mountain Writers Retreat and The Frost Place. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Corners, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review, Obsidian and Ploughshares, among others, and has been featured on The Academy of American Poets Poem-a- Day series and Poets on Poetry series. She is a retired associate professor of English from Medgar Evers College/CUNY.
Linda Susan Jackson
Presenter of Scholarly Papers
Dionne Bennett
Bio forthcoming.
Dionne Bennett
Levi Catoe
Levi Wise Kenneth Catoe Jr. is an actor, singer-songwriter, performing artist, NYC teaching artist, and current English undergraduate at CUNY Medgar Evers College. He first launched his career while working at the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, where he began journaling his experiences into ethnography that would become the foundation of his narratives into black culture. He has released several albums independently, and he was previously a Recording Academy for the Grammy’s Voting-Board member as well as the District Advocate for the Board's NYC Chapter, where he fought to protect songwriter’s copywriters against streaming platforms and won.
He is also a songwriter for the children's charity The Songs of Love Foundation, a music journalist for the music blog Indie Band Guru, a BMI member, and has had music licensed through Epitome Music Library. Wise-Catoe Jr. was the winner of “The Tenth National Black Writers Conference award for poetry.” He has been featured as “Poet of the Week” on The Poetry Super Highway. He is listed in Poets and Writers: ‘Directory of Writers’. His work has appeared in numerous journals both nationally and internationally, including: The Fine Line, The Hollins Critic,, Wilde Magazine, Step Away Magazine, Episodic, etc.
Levi Catoe
Russell Nurick
Dr. Russell Nurick was born and raised on Long Island, New York. He received BA and MA degrees in English from SUNY New Paltz and the University of South Carolina at Columbia respectively. From there, he earned an Advanced Teaching Certificate in Secondary English Education at CUNY Lehman and a PhD in English, with a concentration in African-American literature, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His doctoral dissertation adds to conversations about literary representations of black suffering begun by critics such as Saidiya V. Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Brandon Gordon. It does so by looking at African-American writers, ranging from Frederick Douglass and Henry Bibb to Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as they reflect on their felt obligation to represent black suffering and as they encounter risks of doing so.
Dr. Nurick has three short publications on Elie Wiesel and one on Edythe Mae Gordon and is preparing articles for publication consideration on David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He currently teaches courses in American and global literature at the French-American School of New York.
Russell Nurick
Emcees
Maria DeLongoria
Maria DeLongoria is the Interim Associate Provost for Academic & Faculty Affairs at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and an associate professor in the Department of History.
Over the last fifteen+ years, she has held teaching and administrative positions, presented and published on racial & ethnic identity, race/gender discrimination in Higher Ed, and the lynching of Black women. She has been invited to speak on racial issues and leadership, in addition to presenting on discipline-focused topics. She has developed curriculum and taught a range of courses including United States, Caribbean, and African American History, comparative slavery, women in the African Diaspora, Race Gender & Class, and Black Studies. Her continued research agenda includes the lynching of Black women; racial, ethnic, and cultural identity; popular culture; and teaching and leadership pedagogies of women of color.
Dr. DeLongoria has received several awards in recognition of her commitment to education and community. A proud graduate of two HBCUs, she holds a BA from Virginia State University, A MA from Morgan State, and a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri- Columbia.
Maria DeLongoria
Wallace Ford II
Professor Wallace Ford II is a member of the faculty of Department of Public Administration in the School of Business at Medgar Evers College. Having served as Chair of the Department for four years, he was appointed as an Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. Professor Ford has also taught at Columbia University, Metropolitan College, Pace University, John Jay College, and La Universidad Externado (Colombia).
Professor Ford has extensive experience in both the public and private sectors. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the State of New York Mortgage Agency.
In the private sector, he has managed a national venture capital company, worked as an investment banker, and as an international corporate attorney. Professor Ford has also published two novels, The Pride (2005), and What You Sow (2007) both of which have been recently reissued as e-books. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Race and the Presidency”.
Professor Ford was born in Harlem and educated in Japan, Puerto Rico, and the United States. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College where he was a Senior Fellow, and received his Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. He currently resides in The Bronx.
Wallace L. Ford II
Brenda M. Greene
Bio forthcoming.
Brenda M. Greene
Noel Merritt
Noel Merritt is a senior majoring in ENGLISH with a concentration in Creative Writing. He received his Associate's Degree from LaGuardia Community College. While attending Medgar Evers College, he is fortunate to be a member of the radio club and the current on-air DJ for Medgar Evers Radio.
Noel Merritt
Amelia Rawlins-Henry
Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, Amelia Rawlins-Henry attended Boys & Girls HS and graduated in 2006. Directly after high school she attended Utica College of Syracuse University where she graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism Studies and Psychology in 2010. During her time at Utica College, she received many opportunities to meet, study and travel throughout the world with professional journalists. While in college Rawlins-Henry held positions such as Managing Editor of her school's newspaper, The Tangerine, a student DJ for the school's radio station, WPNR, the secretary of The Society of Collegiate Journalists, the John C. Beherens Chapter and a writer for The Utica Observer Dispatch.
Currently, Rawlins-Henry is the Brooklyn Bureau Chief for News 12 Networks, where she coordinates unique local stories, conducts thorough pre-interviews, and supervises the Brooklyn newsroom. She is also the President of the Women's League of Science and Medicine Inc., an organization that provides scholarship opportunities for youth to further their education. Rawlins-Henry has completed several fellowships with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism covering health and politics.
Amelia Rawlins-Henry
Nana Kofi Osei Williams
Nana Kofi Osei Williams is the co-founder and CEO of Asase Yaa Entertainment Group, LLC, and is highly regarded as an influencer and trailblazer in African dance, music, and culture in Brooklyn, New York. As an institution-builder, he oversees various affiliated entities like the Asase Yaa African-American Dance Theatre, Asase Yaa School of the Arts, Asase Yaa Children’s Arts Camp, and the non-profit Asase Yaa Cultural Arts Foundation. Asase Yaa's mission is to provide impactful, firsthand learning experiences beyond textbooks, fostering cultural enrichment.
Since childhood, Nana Osei (as he is respectfully called) started off as a drummer and dancer. He has progressed through roles as a student, historian, performer, educator, and co-founder. Williams has collaborated with renowned artists, including Pharoah Sanders, Dianne Reeves, Erykah Badu, and many others. He actively shapes programs and remains a musician while providing affordable arts education programs in New York City, serving thousands of students over the decades.
Raised in a family deeply connected to African culture and the Black community, Nana Osei’s journey led him from a private school with a strong African dance program to founding the Asase Yaa African-American Dance Theater in 2003. In recent years, he has ventured into playwriting to educate students about the value of historically black colleges.
Nana K. Osei Williams
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