Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Scholar and Author
About
Taylor writes extensively on race and politics, Black social movements and organizing, and radical activism and politics. Taylor is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. Taylor is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Taylor’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
In 2016, Taylor was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named Taylor among the top one hundred “change makers” in the country. Taylor is among the inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars funded by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. Taylor has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and was also named a Charles H. McIlwain University Preceptor from 2018-2021.