“If there were one impact I’d like my work to have, it would be that people would cease talking about African American history and culture in terms of deprivation or inadequacy and actually acknowledge its depth and complexity and beauty.” 

―Imani Perry

Born just nine years after the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and professor of studies of women, gender and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Perry’s work reflects the deeply complex history of Black thought, art, and imagination. Her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture from indigo to Louis Armstrong and beyond. A finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize, Black in Blues “establishes [Perry] as the most important interpreter of Black life in our time…This is an extraordinary book” (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again and We Are the Leaders).

Her National Book Award-winning book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is a narrative journey through the American South, in which Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A “rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America” (Publishers Weekly), South by America defies classification. Writing in The New York Times, Tayari Jones named it, “an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even Americanness itself… [that] is determined to provoke a return to the other legacy of the South, the ever-urgent struggle toward freedom.” South to America was named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, and Oprah Daily.

Her book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Conceived as a letter to her young sons, this “uplifting and often lyrical meditation on living” (Booklist, starred review) offers compassion, dignity, and resilience as a balm to all Black children facing a world rife with racial hatred. As The New York Times noted, “Breathe is a parent’s unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children’s right simply to be possible.” The book was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.

In each of her previous works, Perry endeavors to apply the lessons of modern history to our present struggle, whether to challenge or to celebrate. Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is a revealing biography of one of the most gifted and charismatic—yet least understood—Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century; May We Forever Stand traces the history of the Black National Anthem; More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States is an examination of contemporary practices of racial inequality that persist despite formal declarations of racial equality; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation is a work of critical theory that traces the thread of modern patriarchy from the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest through the present day; Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop engages with the artistry, politics, and culture of hip hop.

Perry’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.

For more information on Imani Perry, please visit her on Instagram and Twitter.