John’s books include American Histories, Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.
Donald “Field” Brown is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University specializing in African American Literature. His research focuses on Black writers from his home state of Mississippi – and other Black writers who have wrestled with the complexities of African American life in the Deep South. He is currently a visiting professor at his alma mater, Mississippi State University, teaching courses on writers such as Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. In the future, he hopes to write his own creative nonfiction like John Wideman, who is one of his literary role models.
Activist scholar Chelsea Jackson is from Decatur, GA, (Chickasaw Lands) USA. A political science graduate from Emory University, she is a Harry S. Truman scholar and a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. A striving penal abolitionist, her research in the intersections of race, politics and crime led her to receive graduate degrees in political science, criminology, and most recently public policy. Her activism has stretched from student organizing with ATLBSU, briefly to Law for Black Lives DC, and most recently with Mothers4Justice and #RhodesMustFall in the UK. Living and writing in Oxford, Ms.Jackson is a transformative justice facilitator with the CRADLE Community. Her most recent paper is entitled: “Abolition and Racial Democracy: A Genealogy of Black Radical Thought from Douglass to Davis” (2019)
Dr Leila Kamali is a literary scholar with specialisms in African American literature, Black British literature, diaspora, transnationalism and cultural memory. She is Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool and has held lecturing and research roles at King’s College London, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck. Leila is the author of The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and her articles have been published in Callaloo, Obsidian and Atlantic Studies. She is currently planning a major film and education project relating to the work of the great African American writer John Edgar Wideman, and teaches on the world's first MA in Black British Literature at Goldsmiths.
