with Imani Perry

About Imani Perry

Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of South to America, as well as eight other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.   

She comes from a family of educators and is the co-founder of the Black Teacher Archive, a digitized collection of papers that reveals the intellectual, political and cultural contributions of Black educators during the Civil Rights era.  

According to Perry, her writing is driven by the idea of “beloved community” and centers the people “who till the soil and walk the picket line and clean the bathrooms. Those who are seen as existing at the bottom of our society. There is something divine about paying attention to people and places in our midst and understanding that we are deeply connected.”   

Her most recent book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture. Publishers Weekly called it “a pulsing narrative that positions the past as an active, living force in the present. Readers will be swept up.”   

Perry lives between Philadelphia and Cambridge with her two sons.