Imani Perry facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Imani Perry
Perry in 2022
Born	(1972-09-05) September 5, 1972 (age 52) Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.
Academic background
Education	Yale University (BA) Harvard University (JD, PhD) Georgetown University (LLM)
Academic work
Institutions	Rutgers University Princeton University Harvard University
Main interests	Race, law, African American culture, Citizenship, American Politics, Intellectual Traditions, Neoliberalism, Culture and Life, Feminist Thought, Religious Thought

Imani Perry (born September 5, 1972) is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and ... and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Early life

Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her social activist parents when she was five years old. Her mother, Theresa Perry, is a professor in Africana Studies and Education at Simmons University and former dean at Wheelock College. Her stepfather, Steve Whitman, was an epidemiologist noted for studying racial disparities in health care. She has described herself as a "cradle Catholic".

Education and academic career

Perry attended the public elementary school King Open School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside Ilyon Woo. Perry received her Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies and Literature from Yale University in 1994. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School (from which she graduated at the age of 27). She completed a Future Law Professor's Fellowship and received her LLM from Georgetown University Law Center. She credits her childhood exposure to diverse cultures, regions, and religions with creating her desire to study race.

Before joining the Princeton faculty, Perry taught at Rutgers School of Law in Camden for seven years. She received the New Professor of the Year award in her first year and was promoted to full professor at the end of five years, also winning the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. Perry was also a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an adjunct professor at both the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies and Georgetown University Law Center.

In 2009, Perry left Rutgers to join the faculty of Princeton University. .....

In August 2014, Perry appeared on the public radio and podcast On Being, discussing race, community, and American consciousness with host Krista Tippett.

She released two books in 2018, one on the history of the black national anthem (from Oxford University Press) and another on gender, neoliberalism, and the digital age (from Duke University Press).

In 2021, Perry was awarded a Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

On November 17, 2021, Perry's collected artwork, Welfare Queen, by Amy Sherald, sold for $3.9M in a Phillips New York auction.

..... She is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Literary work

Perry is the author of six books and has published numerous articles on law, cultural studies, and African American studies, including a book about Lorraine Hansberry. She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Noble Classics Collection edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Her work is largely influenced by the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and African American literary criticism. Through her scholarship, Perry has made significant contributions to the academic study of race and American hip hop music; she contributed a chapter to 2014's Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic (edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai). Perry's 2022 book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, was a New York Times bestseller, and won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Full publication list

• 2004: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Duke University Press; ISBN: 9780822334354
• 2005: Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Barnes & Noble Classics Series, Notes and Introduction, Barnes & Noble; ISBN: 9781593082932
• 2011: More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, New York University Press; ISBN: 9780814767375
• 2018: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Beacon Press. ISBN: 9780807064498
  • Winner of the 2019
  • New York Times Notable Book of 2018
• 2018: May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN: 978-1-4696-3860-7
• 2018: Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Duke University Press. ISBN: 9781478000600
• 2019: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Penguin Random House ISBN: 978-0807076552
• 2022: South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Ecco Press. ISBN 978-0062977403

Awards