Category: Key People

Hortense Spillers is an American literary critic, Black feminist scholar, and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of a number of texts, including Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Indiana University Press, 1985); Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991); and Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and several volumes of essays and poetry. In 1983, she won both the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award. In 1982, she published The Color Purple, which has become one of her most famous and beloved texts.

bell hooks (1952–2021), also known as Gloria Jean Watkins, was an author, activist, feminist, and professor whose work examined the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class. hooks, who was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, wrote more than 30 books, including Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981). In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Kentucky.

Byllye Avery is an activist, professor and author who cares deeply about unifying Black women, of all economic strata, around issues of health and wellness. In 1981, Avery founded the National Black Women’s Health Project which was later named the National Black Women’s Health Imperative. She co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center — an alternative birthing center in Gainesville, Florida. She also co-founded the Avery Institute for Social Change — “a national organization confronting disparities in access and delivery of health-care services to communities of color.”

Gloria Joseph (1927–2019) was an author, feminist, activist, and professor emeritus of Africana Studies at Hampshire College. She authored many texts, including Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (South End Press, 1981); On Time and in Step: Reunion on the Glory Road (Winds of Change Press, 2008); and, most recently, a bio-anthology of Audre Lorde titled The Wind Is Spirit (OR Books, 2016). She founded several organizations, including the Che Lumumba School for Truth; Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa; and Doc Loc Apiary (Local Honey Production and Educational Outreach). She was also the life partner of Black feminist icon Audre Lorde.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was a Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, and warrior. She was a native New Yorker and the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Through her writing and activism, she advocated for the liberation of oppressed peoples and for organizing to occur across differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, class, and ability. In 1980, she co-founded the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press alongside others, including Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga. She published several sacred texts, including “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” (1981) and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984).

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is a Black feminist scholar, writer, editor, and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Spelman College. Guy-Sheftall has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies, which include the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1979), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith.

Pat Parker was an activist and poet. She was the author of five poetry collections: Jonestown and other Madness (Firebrand Books, 1985), Movement in Black (Diana Press, 1978), Woman Slaughter (Diana Press, 1978), Pit Stop (Women’s Press Collective, 1975), and Child of Myself (Women’s Press Collective, 1972). She courageously addressed such topics as alcoholism, sex, race, and motherhood. She was the director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Oakland, California, and the founder of the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council and the Women’s Press Collective.

Loretta Ross is a feminist, activist, professor, and leader in the fight for reproductive justice for women of color. She is a co-founder of SisterSong and was their national coordinator from 2005–2012. In 1977, Ross and a group of Black and brown women coined the term women of color. She was also part of the group of Black women who coined the term reproductive justice in 1994 and consequently transformed reproductive politics in the U.S. She was one of the first Black women to direct a rape crisis center in the 1970s.

Barbara Smith is a Black feminist, scholar, activist, author, and a leader in establishing the field of Black women’s studies in the U.S. She was the first Black district attorney of Albany County and the first woman mayor of the city of Albany. Smith and her comrades at the Combahee River Collective are credited with originating the term identity politics, which we now refer to as intersectionality.