Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.
Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016) 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 (Haymarket Books, 2012) which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.
Taylor is 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.
When asked by The Nation about the limits of electoral politics, Taylor responded: “We know people died for the right to vote. But people also died for democracy and justice and inclusion, and voting does not necessarily secure that. When people say that, they ignore the most important factor in creating progress in the United States: social movements, and the power of ordinary people to come together collectively, to force the political establishment to adhere to their demands.”
Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
