Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  Imani Perry currently serves as the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 2009, after seven years as a professor at Rutgers School of Law, where she taught constitutional law, contracts, and U.S. legal history. She is the author of six books, including Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004), More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018), and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Her next book, South to America: A Journey, will be published in summer 2021 by Ecco. This book is a travel narrative in the tradition of Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place and V. S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South.

  john a. powell is director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and professor of law, African American studies, and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously the executive director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, and prior to that, the founder and director of the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. powell formerly served as the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is a co-founder of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the boards of several national and international organizations. powell led the development of an “opportunity-based” model that connects affordable housing to education, health, healthcare, and employment and is well known for his work developing the frameworks of “targeted universalism” and “othering and belonging” to effect equity-based interventions. He has taught at numerous law schools, including those at Harvard and Columbia universities. His latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society (2012).

  Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and before that was a professor at Harvard University for nearly a decade. His research explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade make disease, disability, and premature death seem natural for urban residents of color, who are often seen as disposable. Ralph’s first book, Renegade Dreams (2014), received the C. Wright Mills Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the social sciences. His second book, The Torture Letters (2020), explores a decades-long scandal related to hundreds of Black men who were tortured in police custody. He has been awarded a number of prestigious fellowships for his research, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the National Research Council of the National Academies. He earned his PhD and master’s degrees in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor of science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in history, technology, and society. Ralph’s writing has been featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Chicago Review of Books, Boston Review, and Foreign Affairs, to name a few.

  Ishmael Reed is the author of novels, plays, poetry, and nonfiction, and has received prizes in every category. His novel Mumbo Jumbo has been cited by Harold Bloom as one of five hundred great books of the Western canon. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship and is one of a handful of authors to be nominated for two National Book Awards within the same year. He is also a songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Gregory Porter, Cassandra Wilson, Macy Gray, Taj Mahal, and Bobby Womack. His poem “Just Rollin’ Along,” about the 1934 encounter between Bonnie and Clyde and Oakland Blues artist L. C. Good Rockin’ Robinson was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2019. It is also included in Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues: Poems 2007–2019 (2020). Also published in 2020, from Archway Books, is Reed’s ninth and newest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which premiered at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in May 2019. His audio book Malcolm and Me (2020) is available from Audible. The Terrible Fours, the third novel in his “Terrible” series, will be published by Baraka Books in spring 2021. His online literary magazine, Konch, can be found at www.ishmaelreedpub.com.

  Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist whose preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), both published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in South Carolina, he participates in vague spirituality and alternative rock music cultures and enjoys smelling like outside.

  Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, specializes in the Black radical tradition and African American political culture after World War II. His most recent book, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (2019), received the Liberty Legacy Award from the Organization of American Historians. He is currently working on a book about Guyana and African American radical politics in the 1970s. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Souls, New Labor Review, and other publications. His popular writing has appeared in In These Times, Truthout, The Washington Post, and CounterPunch.

  Dorothy E. Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the departments of Africana studies and sociology and at the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Internationally recognized for her work on racism in science, medicine, and legal institutions, Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1998), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2003), Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2012), and more than one hundred scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor of six books. Her honors include election to the National Academy of Medicine and receiving the Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Walter C. Rucker is a professor of African American studies and history at Emory University. He is a specialist in early Atlantic African diaspora and African American history; his teaching and research focus on the generative nexus between slave resistance and culture in the formation of neo-African ethnic groups in the western hemisphere. His books include Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (2015), The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (2005), a co-edited two-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (2006), and a co-edited three-volume work entitled The Encyclopedia of African American History (2010). In addition, he has published a range of book chapters and articles appearing in the Journal of Negro History, The Journal of Black Studies, and The Black Scholar.

  Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow (2019), published by One World. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Prize, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and Kenyon Review. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020–21 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. His next book, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, will be published by One World in 2021.

  Eugene Scott joined The Washington Post in September 2017 to report on the politics of identity in the Trump era. He previously worked at CNN Politics, where he covered the 2016 presidential election and was a senior reporter on the website’s breakin
g news team. He is a regular on-air contributor, providing analysis on MSNBC, CBS, and NPR. Before receiving his master’s from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a researcher for TIME, he spent nearly a decade writing for the USA Today network in Phoenix. He is on the board of advisers at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media and was recently a fellow at the Georgetown University Institute of Politics.

  Chet’la Sebree is the author of the forthcoming Field Study (2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress (2019), winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. She is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University.

  Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2019 he won the Sidney Hillman award for commentary.

  Barbara Smith is an author, activist, and independent scholar who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She was among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith was published in 2014 by SUNY Press. A biography of Smith by Joseph R. Fitzgerald is forthcoming.

  Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the poetry collection Counting Descent (2016), which won the award for best poetry collection from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of the forthcoming narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed (2021). His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Smith received his BA from Davidson College and a PhD in education from Harvard University.

  Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is a Guggenheim fellow; an NEA grant recipient; a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, and MacDowell; a Cave Canem faculty member; professor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University; and a distinguished professor for the City University of New York.

  Brenda E. Stevenson is the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair and a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA. Her book-length publications include The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (1988), Life in Black and White (1997), Underground Railroad (1998), The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins (2015), and What Is Slavery? (2015). Her publications have garnered the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize, the Ida B. Wells Award, and the Gustavus Meyer Outstanding Book Prize. Support for her research has come from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. She is the recipient of the UCLA Gold Shield Award, the John Blassingame Award from the Southern Historical Society, and the Carter G. Woodson Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), which was long-listed for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book. She is also the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. The Organization of American Historians appointed her a distinguished lecturer. Taylor is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker.

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University. Born and raised in Southern California, she earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois. She is the author of Heads of the Colored People (2018), which was long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction and was a Kirkus Prize finalist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She was a 2016 participant in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the 2017 Tin House Workshop, as well as a 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Stanley Elkin Scholar.

  Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark. She earned a BA in English and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and received an MAT in English from Brown University and both an MA in English and a PhD in American Studies from Harvard. She is the director of New Arts Justice at Express Newark and the co-founder of A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. A contributing critic at large for The New York Times, she is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of “The Color Purple”: The Story of Alice Walker’s Masterpiece (2021). In 2020 Tillet received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete the cultural biography All the Rage: Mississippi Goddam and the World Nina Simone Made, forthcoming from Ecco.

  Jemar Tisby is CEO of The Witness Inc., an organization dedicated to Black uplift from a Christian perspective. He is co-host of Pass the Mic, a podcast that amplifies dynamic voices for a diverse church. His writing has been featured by The Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He has spoken nationwide at conferences on racial justice, U.S. history, and Christianity, and is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (2019) and How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice (2020). He studies race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century as a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi.

  Sasha Turner is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (2017), which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. It received honorable mention for the Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. She is currently working on a book on slavery and emotions. Her article “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” published in Slavery and Abolition (2017), has won awards from the African American Intellectual History Society, the Association of Black Women Historians, the Southern Association of Women Historians, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association.

  Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities and is jointly appointed in the department of English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Wake Forest University. He has published broadly in the areas of Africana studies; critical theory and cultural studies; and religion, ethics, and public life. Professor Walker has held faculty and academic leadership positions at Brown University, the University of Virginia, Winston-Salem State University, and Virginia Union Uni
versity, and he has had visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the University of Richmond.

  Harriet A. Washington’s books include the forthcoming Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent (2021) and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She is a writing fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer in bioethics at Columbia University, and has been a Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a visiting fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University and in 2016 was elected a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.

  Craig Steven Wilder is the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at MIT and a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. His most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013). He is the author of A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (2000) and In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (2001). He has taught at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Williams College and has been a visiting professor at the New School and University College London.

  Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval. Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality. Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, and was short-listed for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, making her the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the 6 million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South. Of her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), the venerable UK bookseller Waterstones says it is an “expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world.”