Dr. Micah Khater, “No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons”

Winner, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize

Micah Khater is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work traces how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which excavates the significance of twentieth-century fugitivity as a key to understanding the carceral state’s evolving geographies. Khater’s work is deeply informed by her commitment to abolition and disability justice and seeks to be responsive to the theorization of folx at the forefront of these multifaceted movements. Khater earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in African American Studies and History. In 2022, she was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale for excellence in undergraduate education. Her scholarship has appeared in Southern Cultures and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Dr. Sasha Ann Panaram, “Andaiye and Audre Lorde's Black Transnational Sisterhood; or, 'I Want You in This World’”

Honorable Mention, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize

Sasha Ann Panaram is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University, where she specializes in African American and Caribbean literature and culture, with a particular interest in slavery studies and women’s and gender studies. She holds a PhD in English from Duke University. She is currently the Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Associate in African American & African Diasporic Literature and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. She is working on a book entitled The Aesthetic Afterlives of the Middle Passage: Black Movement, Catastrophe, and Choreographies for Living. Her research has been published in The Black Scholar, Small Axe, Southern Cultures, and The Journal of West Indian Literature. Other public-facing scholarship and interviews have appeared in Public Books, Black Perspectives, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Left of Black.

Giramata, “Black Atlanti[que]s: Trauma, Political Joy and the Possibilities of Black Feminist Storying Traditions”

Winner, Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize

Giramata is a Black feminist community organizer, poet and collage artist. This spring, she completed her Doctor of Philosophy in Gender and Women Studies at the University of Arizona. Giramata’s research interests range from global Black feminisms, anti-colonial memory, anti-colonial film and photography, class struggle and political organizing across the Black diaspora.

Giramata’s dissertation develops a Black feminist visual reading practice, ikinagihe, produced out of Rwanda’s audio-theatrical performances ikinamico to reconceptualize play as a form of anti-colonial visual engagement. It seeks to uncover significant lendings of African philosophies of temporality and life to the larger discourse of Blackness and in turn offer us a different relationship to and definition of memory that antedates colonialism and slavery.  

Overall, Giramata’s work sits at the very point land meets water at the bottom of the ocean, animating the interdependent relationship between Black Africans and the diaspora. In efforts of bridging the gap between theory and praxis as well as community and the academe, Giramata is the convener of Rwanda’s first and only Black feminist organization, Sistah Circle Collective which flagship initiative is Kamaliza Reads, the first all Black feminist free community library in Rwanda. Her work has appeared in the New Times Rwanda, The East African Kenya, CNBC Africa, NAFSI Australia and RFI France among others.She is the convener of Queer and Trans Futurities at the University of Arizona. She has published in the Journal of Black Girlhood Studies, presented at conferences such as NWSA, Facing Race and bell hooks symposium and curated film discussions at the Loft Cinema in Arizona.

Jess Reed, “Glocal on Purpose: Black Girl Imaginings & Possibilities”

Honorable Mention, Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize

Jess Reed (she/her/hers) is a daughter, sister, friend, storyteller, and ice cream lover from Detroit, Michigan. She is also a PhD student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University. She enjoys genuine conversations, asking deep questions, and archiving memories of people and places. Jess’s research specifically celebrates the legacies and possibilities of out-of-school education and African diasporic, glocal consciousness among Black girls and communities.

dr. catherine knight steele, “Black Feminist Pleasure on TikTok: An Ode to Hurston’s ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression”

Winner, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize

Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. There she directs the Black Communication and Technology lab and the graduate program in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Steele studies race and media, specifically focusing on Black discourse, technology, and social media. Catherine’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (Routledge 2023) and Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), which examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S and was the 2022 winner of the Association of Internet Research Nancy Baym Book Award and Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association.

tori justin, m.a., “Fear, Freaks, and Fat Phobia: An Examination of How My 600 Lbs Life Displays ‘Fat’ Black Women”

Honorable Mention, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize

While completing her Master’s in Kinesiology, Tori used qualitiative research methodologies to understand how black women perceived the Body Mass Index (BMI) and how that perception influenced their engagement in physical activity. As she continues as a Doctoral candidate in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, her reasearch examines the socio-historical production of knowledge about health, and how that knowledge constructs and impacts contemporary understandings of race, gender, and obesity. As being “healthy” is a normalized concept that often goes unequestioned, Tori is particulary interested in re-creating health knowledge by centering anti-racist research methods. Tori brings expertise in qualitative methodology, critical theory, social epidemiology, and health equity.

Kéla B. Jackson, “Un-becoming: Deborah Roberts on Black Girlhood"

Winner, Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize

Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University. Her work exists at the intersection of art history, visual culture, Black feminist and girlhood studies. Her dissertation, “UnBecoming: The Poetics of Rupture in Visions of Black Girlhood,” examines contemporary artists Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, and Clarissa Sligh’s respective interventions within the space of Black girlhood. The dissertation reads ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—as evincing the fracturing and remaking of narratives that contain Black girls.   

 Kéla’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, Terra Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institutions. Her work has been published by Boston Art Review, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Harvard Art Museums, and Vanderbilt University Press. Kéla is a graduate of Spelman College (c/o 2019) where she studied art, curatorial studies, and African Diaspora studies.

paul michael thomson, "Lorraine Hansberry & the Kitchen(ette) Sink”

Honorable Mention, “Lorraine Hansberry & the Kitchen(ette) Sink”

Paul Michael Thomson is an interdisciplinary scholar, theatre artist, and co-founder of The Story Theatre, 501(c)(3) in Chicago, IL. Currently pursuing his PhD in Afro-American Studies and a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Paul Michael explores the intersections of creative practice and Black liberation, with a particular investment in incipient Black Feminist aesthetics and queer representations in the drama of the Black Arts Movement. Other research interests include Black Feminisms, 20th and 21st century Black drama, Black women's literature, and non-hierarchical structures in artistic institutions. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Africana Studies, a BFA in Acting, and minors in Spanish & Art History from the Honors College at the University of Arizona. He has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and the Flinn Foundation. To engage more, please visit paulmichaelthomson.com.