Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and one of the leading voices in activism for the rights of racial minorities in the United States. Recognized as one of the 100 most influential African American figures in the country, she is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hammer & Hope, a leading magazine for Black politics and culture. She is the author of the book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), a landmark study that examines the historical discrimination against African Americans in the housing market, awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History. She also wrote From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), which received the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, and co-edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (with Colin Kaepernick and Robin D.G. Kelley, Haymarket Books, 2023), a collection of critical voices from the Black radical tradition. She is the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017), a collection of essays and interviews on the legacy of the pioneering group of radical Black feminists, which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has written for outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Review, The Guardian, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.  She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and her academic work has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians.