Dr. Imani Perry

Dr. Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction; Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, published by Beacon Press in 2018; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, published by Beacon Press in 2019; May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2018; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, an academic monograph published by Duke University Press in 2018; and earlier monographs including Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, published by Duke University Press in 2004.

Her academic training was at Yale Law School and Harvard where she earned a PhD in American Civilization. She previously held a chair at the Princeton Center for African American Studies before her move to Harvard. Her scholarly agenda spans cultural history, Black studies, gender studies, and the broader interdisciplinary work of writing across academic and trade-publishing contexts.

Her mentor focus is long-form narrative nonfiction grounded in archival research and the craft of writing across disciplines without losing the intellectual thread. The specific work of researching in archives, the relationship with archival librarians and collections, the slow accumulation of evidentiary material that supports both academic and trade-book argument. The structural craft of long-form nonfiction — the chapter architecture, the scene-and-summary balance, the integration of primary-source material into narrative.

Her secondary mentor focus is the cross-disciplinary writing practice. The decisions about which questions fit in which forms. The negotiation of academic-publishing and trade-publishing relationships alongside one another. The publication of academic monographs as a separate craft from the publication of trade books. The slow building of a body of work that holds up across multiple disciplinary conversations.

Mentees who book with Imani come from three primary populations. First: senior doctoral students and junior faculty in Black studies, gender studies, American studies, history, and adjacent humanities fields navigating both the academic-monograph and the trade-book pathway. Second: established academics considering substantial trade-book projects that draw on long-arc research programs. Third: independent scholars and writers working in long-form nonfiction outside the academy who want senior craft perspective.

Her style is reflective and craft-attentive. She reads writing samples carefully. She comes prepared with specific notes on structure, prose, and argument. She is generous with the craft-level work and with the broader career-arc conversation.

Outside the Harvard position she contributes regularly to The Atlantic and to other long-form literary and cultural venues. She is a frequent speaker at academic and trade-publishing conferences and at the lecture circuit broadly.

She is a member of the Academia and Research network here as a senior member of the humanities subgroup, the Creative Arts and Media Circle network for the writing-craft conversations, and the Black Church and Faith Tradition network where she contributes to discussion threads on the intersections of Black religious history and Black cultural history.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV, writing sample (academic or trade, no more than thirty pages), and a one-page document on the specific question. She reads the writing before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific writing and the specific career decision. Mentees leave with detailed written notes on the writing sample and a specific action list. Follow-up sessions are common for mentees in active book-length project work.

Her work on the South across South to America is grounded in extensive travel, archival research, and oral-history interviewing across the Southern United States. The book has reached audiences well beyond the academic Black-studies subfield while maintaining scholarly rigor at the level academic readers expect. The methodology of the project — combining travel writing, cultural history, and political analysis — is part of what she discusses with doctoral students and trade-book-considering academics on her mentor practice.

Her work on Lorraine Hansberry in Looking for Lorraine recovers the intellectual and political life of Hansberry beyond the Raisin-in-the-Sun visibility moment. The biographical and intellectual-history method of the book is rigorous and is one of the models she points doctoral students toward when they are considering biographical or intellectual-history projects.

Her early academic work in Prophets of the Hood was field-defining in the academic study of hip hop and remains in print as a reference in adjacent fields. The shift from that specific academic-monograph register to the broader cultural-history register of her subsequent work represents a deliberate evolution of practice that she discusses with mentees considering similar evolutions in their own careers.

Her Atlantic column work and adjacent long-form writing for major literary venues represents the public-scholarship practice that runs alongside the academic work. The integration of the two practices — the academic monograph and the public essay — is part of what she works with mentees on. She is candid about how the two practices have informed each other across her career.

Her engagement in the platform's Academia and Research network, the Creative Arts and Media Circle, and the Black Church and Faith Tradition network reflects her interdisciplinary practice across cultural history, gender studies, Black studies, and the long-form nonfiction work that has reached broader trade-publishing audiences. Her contributions to discussion threads are reflective and craft-attentive, in keeping with her broader writing practice.

The academic-research landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black and African women scholars specifically. The tenure-and-promotion structural conditions, the publication-venue politics, the funding landscape, and the institutional-service expectations all contribute to the long-arc career-trajectory questions that mentees bring to the mentor practice. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level career-progression questions and to the long-arc structural conditions of the academic profession.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV, writing sample (no more than thirty pages), and a one-page document on the specific question. She reads the writing before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific writing and the specific career decision. Mentees leave with detailed written notes and a specific action list.

The platform's mentor infrastructure brings African and African-diaspora women senior mentors into structured engagement with the next generations of women in their fields. The structured booking permits sustained one-on-one relationships across the long arc of the mentee's career; the platform's broader network and event infrastructure permits broader community engagement alongside the individual mentor relationships. Both are part of the larger infrastructure that this platform is building for the women in this work. The mentor practice is one of the foundational layers.