Participants
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Koa Beck
Koa Beck is the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel. Previously, she was the executive editor at Vogue, senior features editor at MarieClaire.com, and cohost of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Her writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, The New York Observer, TheGuardian.com, and Esquire.com, among others. She has been interviewed by the BBC and has appeared on many panels about gender and identity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Columbia Journalism School to name a few. She lives in Los Angeles with her wife.
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Brittney Cooper
Brittney Cooper is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Dr. Cooper is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017). She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, February 2018). She is co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, which was named a top feminist blog by New York Magazine in 2011 and a top race blog by TheRoot.com in 2012. She writes for the CFC as “crunktastic.” In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com’s “Root 100,” an annual list of top Black influencers.
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Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.
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Barbara Smith
Barbara Smith is an author, activist, and independent scholar who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She was among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s. Her career is documented in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (SUNY Press).
Smith was a cofounder of the Combahee River Collective in 1975 and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981, the first U. S. publisher for women of color to reach a wide national audience. She served two terms as a member of the City Council in Albany, New York from 2006 to 2013. In 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
