About
I Love a good story...
When I was a young girl I would read for hours at a time, completely captivated and lost between the covers of a book. I sat in small classrooms at my Philadelphia Quaker school and found myself more and more attracted to what I called “true stories” or what I would later recognize as the field of history.
I attended the University of Pennsylvania where I received my BA in the departments of History and what was then called the Department of Afro-American Studies. By the age of twenty-one, I began my formal journey to the historical profession, eventually receiving my MA and PhD from Columbia University. I followed my interests and my heart- I became a historian of the African American experience and I committed myself to telling the stories of black women who lived, loved, struggled, worked, prayed, and fought to survive in a nation that still recognized many of them as property.
My writing, teaching, and lecturing focus on the uncomfortable concepts of slavery, racial injustice, and gender inequality. While there is deep pain associated with these topics, I marvel at the incredible triumph of survival and the beautiful history of resistance.
