Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies include expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Black girlhood, Haiti, and the diaspora.

Tony C. Perry is Curator of Environmental History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. At the museum he stewards the Extractive Industries collections and is currently curating an exhibition on Gullah Geechee cultural and environmental heritage. His forthcoming monograph, These Flowers, Those Waters, That Garden: The Environment in the Lives of People Enslaved (UNC), examines the relationship between enslaved people and the nonhuman world in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Alexandria Smith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the Department of African American and African Studies. She works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory, writing and thinking about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural work.

Brian C. Smithson is a cultural anthropologist who studies the audiovisual cultures and religions of West Africa. He is completing a book titled Aesthetics of Praise: Making Movies Religious in Bénin—a story about cash-strapped movie producers, Christian–Muslim animosities, and professional rivalries in Yorùbá-speaking Bénin. The book shows how moviemakers overcome these hurdles by championing Yorùbá indigenous religion, its ethical principles, and its moral demands.

I acquire books on Africa and the African Diaspora. My list seeks texts that explore African and Afro-diasporic cultural practices and quotidian life in the contemporary period by connecting them to historical, economic, and political causes. Books on racialization in Africa and its Diaspora, Black colonial and postcolonial life, Black/Afro-feminisms and womanisms, Black transnationalism and international connections, Black queer life and theory, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American politics and identities, Black disability studies, and contemporary Black arts and cultures in the U.S.

Alwin A.D. Jones was raised in Guyana, South America, and came of age in Brooklyn, New York. He’s an alum of Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn, Tufts University and the University of Virginia. He is the author of Black Trinity (St. Bani Press/Alwin A.D. Jones, 2002), a book of poetry. A former professor of Literature and Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, he is currently an upper school English teacher at ECFS and the director of the Fieldston Summer Academic Program. His most recent project is his reggae/dub poetry album titled What is?