Zadie Smith FRSL is a British novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Her work centers around the experiences of Black women in the United States.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.
A video vixen is a female model who appears in hip hop-oriented music videos. From the 1990s to the early 2010s, the video vixen image was a staple in popular music, particularly within the genre of hip hop. The video vixen first came around in the late 1980s when the hip-hop culture began to emerge into its own lifestyle, although was most popular in American popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. Many video vixens are aspiring actors, singers, dancers, or professional models. Artists and vixens have been criticized for allegedly contributing to the social degradation of black women. Latinas are also degraded and hyper-sexualized in hip hop music videos because they are seen as objects of sexual desire in rap music videos.
Contexts: Understanding People in their Social Worlds is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal and an official publication of the American Sociological Association. It is designed to be a more accessible source of sociological ideas and research and has been inspired by the movement towards public sociology.
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Naomi Schaefer Riley is an American conservative commentator and author. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, and The Washington Post, among others. At The Wall Street Journal, she covered religion, higher education, and philanthropy for the editorial page. Prior to this assignment, she founded the magazine In Character.
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education is a former academic journal, now an online magazine, for African Americans working in academia in the United States.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide is a 2016 nonfiction book by Emory University Professor Carol Anderson, who was contracted to write the book after reactions to an op-ed that she had written for The Washington Post in 2014.
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy is a 2017 book about American for-profit colleges by sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation.
Brittney Cooper is a tenured professor of Women and Gender Studies, author, professor, activist, and cultural critic. Her areas of research and work include black women organizations, black women intellectuals, and hip-hop feminism. In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is a 2018 book written by Robin DiAngelo about race relations in the United States. An academic with experience in diversity training, DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" in 2011 to describe what she views as any defensive instincts or reactions that a white person experiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race. In White Fragility, DiAngelo views racism in the United States as systemic and often perpetuated subconsciously by individuals. She recommends against viewing racism as committed intentionally by "bad people".
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Morgan Jerkins is an American writer and editor. Her debut book, This Will Be My Undoing (2018), a collection of nonfiction essays, was a New York Times bestseller. Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands, was released in August 2020. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a 2020 autobiographical book of essays written by the Korean American author Cathy Park Hong. It was published by Penguin Random House in the United States and Profile Books in the United Kingdom and is composed of seven essays about growing up as an Asian-American in a Western capitalist society, more specifically in the United States of America. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2020.
Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.
