- A celebrated poet, author, filmmaker and educator – the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University – Dr. Angelou was a close friend of James Baldwin for over three decades. They had much in common: early years as African-American expatriates in Paris; careers as a best-selling authors; civil rights activism; later years as college professors; and decades of reading each other’s works-in-progress. Because of this, she was our most important collaborator during production of the original BALDWIN film, both off-screen and on. She served as a Scholar/Advisor, an on-camera Witness, and the on-camera ‘Reader’ who helped us select and interpret Baldwin’s texts. Over the years, her collaboration with us continued: she supported our film restoration – and recorded voiceovers for our 50-minute version of BALDWIN, so that students could watch it within a single class period. Completed just a few months before her death, this was one of her last acts of love for “Brother Jimmy.” [ Full Bio ]
- Henry Louis Gates was 14 when he first ‘met’ Baldwin, and discovered that black people, too, wrote books. The book was Notes of A Native Son. Gates describes the experience: “I could not put the book down. I raced through it, then others…” Decades later – by then a well-known author himself – Gates became our Senior Scholar/Advisor during production of the original BALDWIN. His support helped make our film possible. Currently the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Gates continues to be a prolific author – including the recent Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008, and Finding Your Roots: The Official Companion to the PBS Series. He is also an accomplished filmmaker: his six-part PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013) won many awards including an Emmy. In addition, he brings extensive digital experience to our project: his PBS website offers excellent lesson plans and interactive options; he is Editor-in-Chief of both TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine, and the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field. [ Full Bio ]
- Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of the nation's most prominent scholars,is a passionate educator, author, political commentator, and public intellectual who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul", "In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America", and his most recent, the New York Times bestseller, "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own", takes an exhaustive look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. Of Baldwin, Glaude writes, "Baldwin's writing does not bear witness to the glory of America. It reveals the country's sins and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin's vision requires a confrontation with our history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew."
A highly accomplished and respected scholar of religion, Glaude is a former president of the American Academy of Religion. His books on religion and philosophy include "An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion", "African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction", and "Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America", which was awarded the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize.
Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, a program he first became involved with shaping as a doctoral candidate in Religion at Princeton. He served as the inaugural chair of the department for more than fourteen years. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. Combining a scholar's knowledge of history, a political commentator's take on the latest events, and an activist's passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience. -
- Professor Bracey taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1972 and was instrumental in bringing James Baldwin to UMass in the 1980s as a Five College Professor. Bracey during his second stint as department chair, he was co-director of the department’s graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies. His major academic interests were in African American social history, radical ideologies and movements; the history of African American Women; and, most recently, the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans and Afro-Latinos in the United States. During the 1960s, Bracey was active in the Civil Rights, Black Liberation and other radical movements in Chicago. Since his arrival at UMass he maintained those commitments – both on campus and in the wider world. His publications include SOS - Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (with James Smethurst and Sonia Sanchez, 2014); African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-First Century (with Manisha Sinha, 2004); Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (with Maurianne Adams, 1999); the prize winning African American Women and the Vote: 1837-1965 (1997); and Black Nationalism in America (1970). His scholarship also includes editorial work on the microfilm series Black Studies Research Sources (LexisNexis).
- Dr. Blint is a scholar, writer and curator. He is assistant professor of Literature in the department of Literary Studies, director of the program in Race and Ethnicity, and affiliate faculty in Gender Studies at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (2014), and wrote the introduction and notes for the eBook Baldwin For Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for a Time of Sorrow and Struggle (Beacon Press 2016). Upcoming books include A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture, and A Queer Spirit: Incidents in the Life of the Americas. He is also editor of the forthcoming Cambridge African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990, and Approaches to Teaching the Works of James Baldwin currently under preparation for the Modern Language Association. His writing has appeared in Anthropology Now, African American Review, The James Baldwin Review, McSweeney’s, The Brooklyn Rail, sx visualities, and the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought where he serves as editor-at-large. Curatorial projects include Renee Cox: Revisiting The Queen Nanny of the Maroons Series, Columbia University (2016), The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film, The Film Society of Lincoln Center (2015), The First Sweet Music, The John and June Alcott Gallery, Hanes Art Center (2014), and Bigger Than Shadows, DODGEgallery, New York (2012; with Ian Cofre). He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship foundations.
- Dr. Elam is Stanford University’s Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Professor of English, and Director of Stanford’s interdisciplinary graduate program, Modern Thought and Literature (MTL). She first discovered Baldwin at age 15. “He came at me like a beacon across time and space – calling to me, calling on me. A Stranger in the Village was a class assignment; I must have read it ten times that first day.” While at Stanford, Elam has served as Director of the Program in African & African American Studies (2007-10), Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English (2006-8) and Director of Curriculum (2011-13). She is also an affiliate with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, African & African American Studies, and Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. An award-winning author, Elam is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (2003), The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (2011), and Editor of the Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). Her current work-in-progress examines an expanding notion of blackness in the post-Obama generation of writers. In addition, she is thrice the recipient of the St. Clair Drake Outstanding Teaching Award at Stanford (2004, 2006, 2015) and the Faculty Award for “Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Students as a Teacher, Advisor and Mentor” from the Program in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (2013).
- Dr. Goldsby is a professor of English, African American studies and American studies at Yale University, and serves as chair of the Department of African American Studies. Recently appointed as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Goldsby has taught numerous courses on Baldwin, including a graduate course on “James Baldwin & the Politics of Formlessness” and the 2017 Franke Lectures in the Humanities, “James Baldwin’s American Scene.” She is the author of the award-winning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature and editor of a Norton Critical Edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. A current work-in-progress is Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s, about the “lost generation – those fabulous, brilliant writers of the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement era.” During her research for Birth of the Cool, Goldsby has led the University of Chicago’s archival effort Mapping the Stacks, making manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and moving images from the 1930s-1970s accessible to researchers and the public.
- A writer and academic, Dr. Douglas Field is a lecturer in 20th-century American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. He first read James Baldwin during his undergraduate degree, an encounter that shaped not only his academic career, but also his philosophical, political and aesthetic outlook. In addition, Field is co-founding editor of the James Baldwin Review and the editor of A Historical Guide to James Baldwin (2009). In 2011, he organized the international Baldwin conference in New York, “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination,” in collaboration with Rich Blint (then of Columbia University); in 2013, he and Blint co-edited the first African American Review special issue devoted to Baldwin. Field has also written a number of articles on Baldwin, including pieces for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, where he is a frequent contributor, as well as two recent books: James Baldwin (2011) and All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (2015). He is currently trying to write about someone else, but with little success.
- Editor of the highly regarded African American Review and Associate Professor of English at St. Louis University since 2008, Dr. Grant’s long-standing admiration of James Baldwin has culminated in the recent AAR Special Issue (Winter 2013) devoted exclusively to analyses of Baldwin’s writings and cultural influences: the first critical special issue ever devoted to Baldwin. Also an author in his own right, Grant’s numerous publications include Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing and Modernity (2004) as well as numerous book reviews, book chapters and essays on August Wilson, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Owen Dodson and, of course, James Baldwin. In addition, Grant has been a Fulbright scholar and is a frequent lecturer and panelist.
- Long before his college years, Dr. Hatton read James Baldwin voraciously – and continues to interpret life, both personal and national, through the Baldwinian lens. Currently an assistant professor of literature and philosophy at the University of California, Merced, Hatton has also taught courses at Stanford, UC Berkeley and the University of Würzburg in Germany, as well as in California State Prisons. His numerous fellowships and grants include a recent policy directive project for the University of California on African American Women and Ending Cultures of Homicides. His published work includes essays on the relationship of human rights and literature, as well as the literary and political ideas of writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Søren Kierkegaard, Jose Marti, and Ivan Klima. Several of his articles appear in the series titled Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art, as well as in journals such as The James Baldwin Review and Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice. A chapter on “Kierkegaard and Human Rights” is forthcoming in a collection titled Kierkegaard and Political Theology. An essay focused on W.E.B. Du Bois will appear in the African-American Literature in Transition series from Cambridge University Press. His current book-in-progress examines Kierkegaard’s inter-textuality with African-American Literature and Culture, from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin to the art of William Henry Johnson and Kara Walker and the music of John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster.
- Dr. Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. The recipient of numerous fellowships following his Ph.D. from Temple University, he credits Baldwin for having shaped his academic experience. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. Prior to joining the UT faculty, Joseph was a professor at Tufts University, where he founded the school’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people’s lives. In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, Joseph wrote the award-winning books Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His most recent book, Stokely: A Life, has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase “black power.” Included among Joseph’s other book credits is the editing of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.
- An award-winning writer, biographer and educator, Dr. Kenan frequently stated that James Baldwin was one of his idols. He authored two books on Baldwin – a young adult biography in 1993, and a collection of Baldwin’s unpublished essays, The Cross of Redemption, in 2010 – but the connection between them goes beyond admiration. A Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he agreed to be a consulting scholar for the James Baldwin Project, Kenan was raised in rural North Carolina where as a young African-American homosexual he struggled with issues of identity, morality and self-acceptance … just as the young Jimmy Baldwin struggled with similar issues in his urban environment. As adults, they both turned to writing. Like Baldwin, Kenan explored racial and sexual boundaries in his fiction; like Baldwin, Kenan assesses the state of the black community in his non-fiction. They both wrestled with questions of religion, sexuality, class inequality and racial ‘progress’ – and both confronted the truth with eloquence. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Randall Kenan continues Baldwin’s literary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’" Kenan’s additional publications include Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction; Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999), a Southern Book Award nominee; and The Fire This Time (2007), a non-fiction homage to Baldwin. Kenan was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, he was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature. [ Full Bio ]
- A humanities professor and author, Dr. Leeming is known for his biographies – including James Baldwin: A Biography and Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney – as well as numerous books on mythology and religion. He was also a close friend of Baldwin’s. He first knew Jimmy in Turkey, then served as his personal assistant for a time and, ultimately, became his biographer. As one of our Scholar/Advisors on the original BALDWIN film, Leeming brought years of writing, teaching and astute literary analysis to the project, along with a first-person understanding of Jimmy. Leeming’s insights helped shape our film: in part, by exploring how religion influenced Baldwin’s writings … and by defining the source of Baldwin’s personal demons. In essence, Leeming sees Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, a much-needed “voice in the wilderness” whose essays are sermons and whose novels are parables, all written in hopes of improving the human condition. “Baldwin’s importance – now some 30 years after his passing – cannot be easily over-estimated. His words are still vital, and he deserves to be heard.” [ Full Bio ]
- Dr. Miller's long-standing interest in James Baldwin began when he was earning his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut under the tutelage of Baldwin biographer David Leeming. Now Professor and Chair of English at Suffolk University in Boston, Miller is passing the torch by teaching Baldwin to undergraduates. He has also written extensively on Baldwin: over twenty articles and reference volume entries, including an essay for the inaugural issue of The James Baldwin Review. His most recent Baldwin articles appeared in African American Review and The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin; his most recent Baldwin book is A Criminal Power: James Baldwin and the Law (2012). A current work-in-progress is James Baldwin in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In addition, Miller is author, editor, or co-editor of ten books, including The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature (2016) and Understanding John Edgar Wideman (2017). His interest in Wideman stemmed from time spent teaching in prisons in the 1990s, which in turn led to a fascination with works by prisoners and about the prison experience. Beyond teaching and writing, Miller organized the 2009 Baldwin conference in Boston and co-organized the 2013 conference in Montpellier, France.
- Dr. Mitchell is an award-winning literary historian, cultural critic and professional development expert. As an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, she specializes in African American literature, racial violence throughout U.S. literature and culture, black drama & performance. As a scholar and author, she examines how texts – both written and performed – can help terrorized families and communities survive and thrive. She also teaches a seminar on Baldwin, and considers him a "guiding light" whose influence can be seen in all of her work. Her Living with Lynching: African American Plays, Performance, and Citizenship (2011) received two book awards; her work-in-progress From Slave Cabins to the White House will be published in 2018. She is also a prolific essayist: recent efforts include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” (American Quarterly, March 2012), and “Love in Action” (Callaloo Journal, 2013), a piece that draws parallels between past racial violence and anti-LGBT violence today.
- An award-winning poet and author of numerous works on James Baldwin, Dr. Pavlić is the Distinguished Research Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, and director of the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing. In 2015, he authored James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (2015). In 2014, his most recent book of poetry Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno won the National Poetry Series Open Competition; in 2012, his Visiting Hours at the Color Line won the same award. Additional publications include But Here Are Small Clear Refractions; Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway; Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue; Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture; and Labors Lost Left Unfinished. Forthcoming works include Live at the Bitter End: A Trial by Opera; Another Kind of Madness: A Novel in 88 Improvisations; and No Time To Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to his Brother David (currently under review by the James Baldwin Estate). Additional prizes include the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award, the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, the Writer of the Year Award from the Georgia Writer’s Association, and the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review. Pavlić has also held fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, the Willson Center for the Humanities, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He has taught poetry at Summer Literary Seminars in Russia and Kenya.
- A renowned biographer, Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Rampersad is Stanford University’s Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities. Back in early 1989, Rampersad was a member of the National Endowment for the Humanities panel who approved our original post-production grant for BALDWIN … and in June of the same year, he chaired a two-day panel on James Baldwin at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The program opened with a tribute by Toni Morrison and a screening of the almost-completed BALDWIN film. Subsequently, Rampersad wrote a glowing critique of the film for California Newsreel, our educational distributor. “Not to be missed by anyone to whom Baldwin’s writing is important! A poignant, unforgettable commentary on his ideas.” Now, decades later, Rampersad is an official Scholar/Advisor of the James Baldwin Project. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, he moved to the US in 1965. His biographies include The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (1976); The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. I & II (1986, 1988); Days of Grace: A Memoir (co-authored with Arthur Ashe, 1993); Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997) and Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007). In addition, he has edited collections of works by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; he has co-edited Slavery and the Literary Imagination (with Deborah McDowell) and Race and American Culture. (with Shelley Fisher Fishkin). His biography of Langston Hughes, Volume I, was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize. His biography of Ralph Ellison was a finalist for both the 2007 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. [ Full Bio ]
- From 2007-2012, Dr. Shabazz served as Chair of the DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – the same department where James Baldwin taught back in the 1980s as a Five-College Professor. From 2014-2015, he was an American Council on Education Fellow, identifying and preparing the next generation of senior leadership for the nation's universities. From 2014-2016, he served as Vice President of The National Council for Black Studies, the premier organization of Black Studies professionals in the world. A Fulbright Senior Specialist, author and lecturer, Shabazz is now both a Umass Professor of Afro-American Studies and the Umass Faculty Advisor for Diversity and Excellence in the Office of the Chancellor. A recipient of many awards and fellowships, Shabazz holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Houston, and is known for his advocacy related to race and professional advancement. As co-editor / writer of The Forty Acres Documents (with Imari Obadele and Johnita Scott Obadele, 1994), he introduced one of the earliest scholarly works in the modern movement for reparations for slavery. More recent works include the award-winning Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas (2004) and Women & Others: Perspective on Race, Gender, and Empire (2007). He is also a well-known community activist in Central Massachusetts where he chairs – and emcees – numerous civic events such as the annual Juneteenth Jamboree.
- A blues singer/harmonica player who has opened for B.B. King, Muddy Waters and many others – and has recorded with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra – Steve Tracy uses his music to enhance his teachings on Baldwin and other writers. A Fulbright Senior Specialist and Distinguished Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Tracy is also a prolific author: he has written, edited, co-edited, or provided introductions for thirty-one books; provided over seventy contributions to book publications edited by others; written over fifty CD liner notes; and taught, lectured, and presented papers in the US, Canada, England, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, and China. Most recent is his Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature (2015) – which Arnold Rampersad calls “an extraordinary, indispensable book from a remarkable American scholar” – and Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2011), an edited collection of essays. Two of his earliest works – Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader (1999) and Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City. (1990) – are listed as preeminent reference books in the field. In addition, in 2012, Tracy lectured and taught courses in Ethnic Literature, American Literature and the Blues as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. In 2013, he was selected as a Chu Tian Scholar: the most prestigious scholar award in Hubei Province, China, this supports his residence in Wuhan, China, two months a year for six years. In 2016, he was inducted into the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi at UMass Amherst.
- Dr. Zaborowska first encountered James Baldwin on television, as a young high school student in Poland. A decade later, as a young professor in the U.S., she switched her focus on immigrant writers to a concentration on Baldwin and African Diaspora literatures of the 20th century. Along with numerous essays on Baldwin, her most recent book is the award-winning Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009. Her soon-to-be-published Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity (2018) will be followed by a free-access digital project archiving Baldwin's house-museum in St. Paul-de-Vence. Currently a Professor at the University of Michigan – in both the Department of American Culture and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies – Zaborowska is the 2017-18 John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. In 2014, she received the 2014 Michigan Humanities Award from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts; in 2010, she was the Huntington Humanities Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. She has also been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of African American Studies at universities in France, Italy and Denmark. Her other books include How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives and various edited collections. In addition, she has authored numerous scholarly articles in both the U.S. and Europe; among them is an entry on Baldwin in the Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies.
JAMES BALDWIN PROJECT
Scholar / Advisor Bios
Dr. Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
John H. Bracey, Jr. (1941 - 2023)
Rich Blint
Michele Elam
Jacqueline Goldsby
Douglas Field
Nathan Grant
Nigel De Juan Hatton
Peniel E. Joseph
Randall Garrett Kenan (1963 - 2020)
David A. Leeming
D. Quentin Miller
Koritha Mitchell
Edward Pavlic
Arnold Rampersad
Amilcar Shabazz
Steven C. Tracy
Magdalena J. Zaborowska
. . . . . . .