Jerald Walker

Along with the memoirs Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, and The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, Jerald Walker is the author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, a Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction and winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. His work has appeared in publications such as The Harvard Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and it has been widely anthologized, including five times in The Best American Essays series.

Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Nonfiction, Walker is a Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literature at Emerson College. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa, and the Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.