Keisha N. Blain

Keisha N. Blain

Fellow: Awarded 2022
Field of Study: U.S. History

Competition: US & Canada

Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian and writer. She is currently a full professor of Africana Studies and history at Brown University and an opinion columnist for MSNBC. Her writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation, Foreign Affairs, and more. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); and the coeditor (with Ibram X. Kendi) of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021). Her latest book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dr. Blain is now writing a major new history of human rights framed by the ideas and activism of Black women in the United States from 1865 to the present. The book will be published by W.W. Norton.

Photo Credit: Keisha N. Blain

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