Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.

​She is author "Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership," published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. "Race for Profit" was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Her earlier book "From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation" won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of "How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective," which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018, and co-editor with Colin Kaepernick and Robin D.G. Kelley of "Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies."

Taylor is a cofounder of Hammer & Hope and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.

In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.

She is currently a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.