Biographies in Bold: Black Women & U.S. Systems of Power

This public event featuring two award-winning authors, Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers and Dr. Alison Parker, will explore how the impact of biography, the centering of Black women’s voices, and the art of storytelling empowers writers and engages readers in the ever-important task of revealing a more expansive, enlightening history of the United States.

Please join the authors afterwards for a book signing! Books will also be available for sale. 

Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. She earned her doctorate in U.S. History from Rutgers University, specializing in African American History and Women’s History. A historian of Black Women, her research focuses on race, gender, power, and freedom in the Old South. 

Dr. Myers has been the recipient of several awards for her scholarship, including a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies; the 2012 Julia Cherry Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians; the 2011 Anna Julia Cooper-C.L.R. James Book Prize from the National Council for Black Studies; and the 2024 Best Book Award from the Kentucky Historical Society.

Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by UNC Press in 2011. Her second monograph, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, was released by UNC/Ferris & Ferris Books in late 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Stone Book Award by the National Museum of African American History. 

Alison M. Parker is Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in U.S. women's and gender history, African American history, and legal history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Among other books, Parker is author of Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997). This year, her biography, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in a second edition paperback. Dr. Parker also serves as an editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press.