Biography
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of racial inequality in public policy making and the various ways that Black communities have challenged or resisted these constraints. She is a 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 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction (2018). In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.
She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organisation of American Historians by the Organisation of American Historians. Taylor is among the inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars funded by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. She is a 2021 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Taylor earned an MA in African American Studies from Northwestern University (2011) and a PhD in African-American Studies from Northwestern University (2013).
Keeanga lives and works in Philadelphia.
SAF participation: March Meeting 2022