Author: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Discover the story behind how one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world, Kimberle W. Crenshaw, became the person she is today. Crenshaw will be in conversation at the Main Library Open House, celebrating 30 years of the Main Library and 30 years of the African American Center. Ms. Crenshaw will be in conversation with Courtney Desiree Morris. 

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory. Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. 

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, and has appeared as a commentator on media outlets including MSNBC and NPR.

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. As a scholar, her work examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; authoritarianism and Latin American statecraft; race, energy, and environmental politics in the African Diaspora; and Black feminist/queer aesthetics and visual culture. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023).