Artist Bios

M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and currently lives in Canada. She has written essays, reviews, poetry, novels, short fiction, and more. She received her B.Sc. in Economics from the University of the West Indies in 1968 and an M.A. in Political Science as well as a law degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1973. She has taught at the University of Toronto and York University. She has also served as the writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. She has published five books of poetry, two novels, four essay collections, and two plays.

Saidiya Hartman grew up in Brooklyn and is currently working as a professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1984 and her PhD from Yale University in 1992. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University, she was a professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published three books and numerous essays and articles.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and moved to the United States in 1981 at the age of twelve. She received her B.A. in French literature from Barnard College in 1990 and her M.F.A. from Brown University in 1993. Danticat has taught creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami. She has published novels, short story collections, essay collections, and children’s books. Her novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her televised book club in 1998.

Janelle Monáe was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1985 and grew up in Quindaro, Kansas. She is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and producer. She is currently signed to Atlantic Records and her own Wondaland Arts Society. Monáe has appeared in films like Moonlight (2016) and Hidden Figures (2016). She has released three studio albums with Dirty Computer (2018) being her most recent.

Beyoncé Knowles was born in Houston, Texas. She is a Grammy Award-winning recording artist and actress. She has starred in films such as Dream Girls (2006) and the recent The Lion King (2019). Before her solo music career, she was part of the R&B group, Destiny’s Child. Her first solo album, Dangerously In Love (2003), won five Grammy Awards. She has released six solo studio albums to date with Lemonade (2016) being her most recent. In 2018, she released a joint album, Everything Is Love, with her husband Jay-Z.

Adam J. Banks grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and currently works as a professor and faculty director in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Stanford University, Banks taught at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Research and at Syracuse University in the Writing Program. His work focuses on African American rhetoric, community literacy, issues surrounding technology, and much more.

June Jordan was born in Harlem, New York in 1936 and grew up in Brooklyn. She was a poet, activist, teacher, and essayist. She received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1953 and began teaching at the City College of New York in 1967. She also taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan is the author of more than twenty-five works of poetry, fiction, essays, and children’s books.

Hattie Gossett was born in New Jersey and currently works as a Black feminist playwright, poet, and magazine editor. She received her M.F.A. from New York University in 1993. Gossett was involved early on in Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press founded in 1980 by Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith. She has taught workshops on writing, Black literature, and Black music at Rutgers University, Oberlin College, and more. On top of having her work published in several anthologies, she has published several books of poetry as well as a CD, live and unedited, in 2001.

Audre Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian parents. She received her B.A. from Hunter College and her M.L.S. (Masters in Library and Information Science) from Columbia University. She worked as a librarian in the New York public school system throughout the 1960s. She began teaching as a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in the 70s where her experiences as a Black, queer, female teacher informed her writing. Lorde has published poetry, memoir, essay collections, speeches, and novels. In 1981, she founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press along with fellow-writer Barbara Smith.

Margo Natalie Crawford is an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University’s American Studies Program where she focused on 20th and 21st century African American literature, visual culture, and global studies. Her recent book, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and 21st Century Black Aesthetics was published in 2017 and discusses the Black avant-garde moment of the 1960s and 1970s. Her work has also been published in a large variety of books and journals.

Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised by her paternal grandmother until 1943 when she moved to Harlem, NY to live with her sister, father, and stepmother. She received her B.A. in political science from Hunter College in 1955 and went on to do postgraduate work at New York University. Sanchez formed a writers’ group in Greenwich Village, NY that included poets, like Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Ethridge Knight. Involved in activism throughout the 1960s, Sanchez fought for integration before booming more interested in Black heritage from a separatist point of view. She was at the forefront of developing Black studies at both San Francisco State University and the University Pittsburgh.

Toni Morrison was born February 18th 1931 in Lorain, Ohio and passed away recently on August 5th 2019. After earning her B.A. at Howard University in 1953, Morrison went on to earn her M.A. at Cornell University in 1955. Morrison is often most lauded for own literature; however, she was also the fiction editor at Random House and had a huge influence in getting a number of influential texts, particularly by other Black writers, published. She taught writing at both State University of NY in Albany and Princeton University where she retired in 2006. In 1993, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Phillis Wheatley was one of the most well-known poets in pre-19th century America. Wheatley was enslaved by John Wheatley, a wealthy commercialist in Boston. Wheatley’s name was used to illustrate Black intellectual and creative talent particularly in service of the abolitionist movement. Wheatley was seven years old when she was taken from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa and transported to the Boston docks where she was sold to the Wheatley family. By the age of 18, Wheatley had collected 28 of her poems into a book. Recent research has shown that Wheatley may have written a total of 145 poems throughout her lifetime.

Lavett Ballard has an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she still lives and works today. She also has a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History–with a minor in Museum Studies–from Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited in multiple museums and galleries. In her own words, Ballard’s interests include “History, Colorism, Afro-futurism & feminine beauty.”

Molly Barnewitz received their M.A. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Utah in 2016. Their work focuses on the relationship between comics and representations of LGBTQ+ identities. As a staff writer for ComicsVerse.com, Barnewitz applies this focus to their work on “queer representation and ecocriticism in pop culture” (queer spectra.com). Barnewitz also serves on the committed for Salt Lake City’s Grid Zine Fest.

Candice Benbow is a theologian and writer whose works focuses on the relationships between “beauty, faith, feminism, and culture” (candicebenbow.com). Her work has been published in ESSENCE Magazine, Glamour Magazine, VICE, Shondaland, and MadameNoire. While the Lemonade Syllabus is the effort of multiple collaborators, Benbow wrote the syllabus’ foreword. In order to make the work accessible, the syllabus’ creators made the it freely downloadable and within the first week alone, it was downloaded 40,000 times. In 2015, Benbow founded Red Lip Theology, “a womanist movement to encourage women to embrace themselves as good creation” (candicebenbow.com). Benbow has also founded Zion Hill Media Group and The LouiseMarie Foundation.