People

” moyazb”

Moya Bailey is a graduate candidate and scholar of critical race, feminist, and disability studies at Emory University. Her current work focuses on constructs of health and normativity within a US context. She is interested in how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the founder and co-conspirator of Quirky Black Girls, a network for strange and different black girls. She loves to talk about TV, Lil’ Wayne, Black Nihilism, all things queer, fierce, and transformative.

“rboylorn”

Robin M. Boylorn is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at The University of Alabama.  Dr. Boylorn received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida.  As a Richard F. Pride Fellow she earned numerous awards and honors for her teaching, creative writing and scholarship including the Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award from The International Center for Qualitative Inquiry for Southern Black Women: Their Lived Realities.  She teaches and writes about the intersections of race, gender/sex, class and sexuality and her primary research interests focus on the lived and storied experiences of black women, black feminism, social identity, diversity, and critical auto/ethnography.  She writes evocative scholarship and personal narrative in an effort to make her work accessible to a wide audience and to urge critical engagement of cultural phenomenon .  She is the author of Sweetwater:  Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Peter Lang, January 2013), and co-editor of the forthcoming Critical Autoethnography:  Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (Left Coast Press).

Jalylah Burrell is a Seattle-bred, Harlem-based writer, educator, oral historian, arts advocate and deejay. A graduate of Spelman College and New York University, she is currently a Ph.D student at Yale University. She has hosted the radio program There Ought To Be More Dancing since 2010. Follow her on Twitter @jalylah.

“Crunktastic”

Brittney C. Cooper is co-founder of the Collective. She received her Ph.D. from Emory in 2009 and spends her days as Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University where she specializes in Black Feminist Thought, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Hip Hop Studies, and Digital Feminisms. Crunktastic is most well-known for calling folks on their  racist and sexist B.S. in her impassioned posts about gender politics in and among the Hip Hop Generation, convergences of faith and feminism, dating while feminist, and contemporary feminist movements.  She is also working on her first book, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition.  Dr. Cooper is also a 2012 Progressive Women’s Voices Fellow at the Women’s Media Center. She is a fan of T.I., Lil’ Wayne, Cee-Lo and OutKast and feels fortunate to have come of age in the Decade of the Female Emcee (1990s). Follow her on Twitter @ProfessorCrunk. 

Ashon Crawley received his doctoral degree in English from Duke University in 2013. He will be joining the department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside in the fall of 2013 as Assistant Professor of African American Studies.  His dissertation, “Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism” – an extension and critique of the disciplining of, in and as “black studies,” focusing on aesthetics, performance and sexuality as a social force with which institutional Black Studies contends – is being edited for his first book project. He has published work in Current Musicology, Sounding Out! (soundstudiesblog.com) Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, The Journal of Theology and Sexuality, Black Theology: An International Journal and in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Follow him on Twitter @ashoncrawley and Tumblr @whatijustread.

Asha L. French is a writer and PhD candidate who studies 20th Century American literature with a focus on black women authors. A member of the Affrilachian Poets (2nd Generation), her poetry has appeared in PMS poemmemoirstory, Warpland, and PLUCK!: the Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. She has also published short fiction and is a blogger for and member of The Crunk Feminist Collective. In 2005, she was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, she resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Crunkadelic”

Susana M. Morris is co-founder of the CFC and a contributing writer on the blog.  She received her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2007  and is currently an assistant professor of English at Auburn University, where she teaches courses on topics such as African American autobiography, Black Feminist Theory, the Civil Rights Movement, and depictions of the Black Family in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Her book project, Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, is forthcoming on the University of Virginia Press. Writing as Crunkadelic on the CFC blog, she covers a range of topics such as politics, self-care, sizeism, and reality TV, often irreverently.  Her iPod has a mix of all types of soul music, with a smattering of Dolly Parton and Florida booty pop music, and her DVR is filled with episodes of Parks and Rec and the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Follow her on Twitter, where she tweets @iamcrunkadelic and shares random thoughts, feminist musings, and obnoxiously live tweets during Scandal.

“EeshaP”

Eesha Pandit

Eesha Pandit is a writer and activist who believes in social justice movements, the power of intersectionality, feminism, sisterhood and the power of art. Her writing can be found here at The Crunk Feminist Collective, The Nation, Feministing, Salon, RH Reality Check, Feministe and In These Times. She has also appeared on numerous TV news outlets including CNN, HLN, MSNBC and Grit TV with Laura Flanders.

She most recently worked as Executive Director of Men Stopping Violence, a social change organization dedicated to ending men’s violence against women. She’s also served as as Women’s Rights Manager at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization. At Breakthrough Eesha worked on the Bell Bajao! (Ring the Bell!) Campaign that asks men and boys to take action, get involved and help end violence against women. Previously, Eesha served as Director of Advocacy at Raising Women’s Voices (RWV). RWV is a national initiative working to make sure women’s voices are heard and women’s concerns are addressed as policymakers put the new health reform law into action. At RWV, Eesha coordinated a national field network of 22 state-based regional coordinators working to include women’s health access in local, state and national policy efforts. Eesha has also served as Associate Director of Programs at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College where she coordinated the organization’s New Leadership Networking Initiative and the Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps. She’s worked with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, and Amnesty International USA’s Women’s Rights Program. Eesha currently serves on the board of the National Network of Abortion Funds. She has a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.

For the CFC, Eesha blogs about politics and activism, as well as occasional forays into pop-culture.  She can spend hours, often with @iamcrunkadelic, discussing the machinations on our favorite TV dramas (read: Scandal), you can follow her on Twitter at @EeshaP.

“sheridf”

Sheri Davis-Faulkner is an interdisciplinary scholar working in College of the Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology to develop University-community partnerships in West Atlanta.  Davis-Faulkner received her PhD in 2012 from the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University.  An Atlanta native, she currently works across higher education institutions in Atlanta to advance coordinated engagement and accountability that enhances the educational landscape of youth and students in adjacent communities.  In addition to teaching a Poverty and Social Justice course at Spelman College, she has also taught Women’s Studies, American Studies, and Visual Culture courses at Clark Atlanta University and Emory University.  Beyond the academy Davis-Faulkner works with environmentalists and direct service health organizations to engage college students and local youth in community building as agents of change. Her research interests are feminist media studies, corporate body politics, food and environmental literacy as public health interventions, black feminist literature for social justice, labor rights, and digital literacy. Sheri is passionately committed to partnership with Treston Davis-Faulkner, her crunk feminist husband, and parenting Na’im Faulkner, her fire+Leo six-year-old son.  She spends her time planning school events with the Parent Teacher Student Association as well as playing basketball and chess, hiking at our Nature Trail, baking sweet potato waffles, watching Wild Kratz and wild animal nature shows, being on picket lines, and practicing capoeira with her boys.

Actual picture of J.Lo

Crunkista is a Caribbean born first generation immigrant; a true city girl with a real country heart; resides in the Northeast and daydreams of being on the beach daily. Crunkista blogs anonymously. She is still very skeptical of the internet and is very protective of her privacy.

Crunkista: Feisty; Latina; queer; sustained by her chosen family; tired of the homophobia she encounters all too regularly; can’t stand patriarchy, is so over him and wishes he would just STOP calling; was raised by a community of FIERCE women; gets angry quite often; sometimes has un-feminist moments; has had her heart broken … a few times; loves to spoon; is often told she looks like Jennifer Lopez – does not in fact look like J. Lo. ; loves Sonja deeply and is working on being better for her; is a child of Yemaya; has learned a whole lot of lessons from past relationships; thought folks were way too hard on Kim; loves DIY holiday gifts; is always ready for love; won’t ever deny that she is a f#@%g feminist; addicted to swag; survivor of child abuse;  and done with bullshit apologies. Most recently Crunkista was given the title of baby whisperer.