Robin M. Boylorn is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at The University of Alabama.  She received her Ph.D. from University of South Florida in 2009.  She teaches and writes about issues of social identity and diversity but her primary research interests focus on the lived and storied experiences of blackgirls and women.

She is a critical auto/ethnographer who writes evocative scholarship and personal narrative in an effort to make her work accessible to a wide audience.  She is the author of the award-winning monograph Sweetwater:  Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Peter Lang, 2013), and co-editor of Critical Autoethnography:  Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (Left Coast Press, 2014).

She enjoys old school hip hop, poetry, soul food, and stories by/about black women.  Her favorite things include organic soap, scented candles and earth tones.  To unwind she crochets blankets and watches sports, sometimes simultaneously.

FMI on her work and words check out her website, www.robinboylorn.com

 

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.

 

Susana M. Morris is co-founder of the CFC and a contributing writer on the blog.  She received her Ph.D. from Emory University and is currently an associate professor of English at Auburn University, where she teaches African American literature. 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 in February 2014. 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 music, and her DVR is filled with episodes of Parks and Rec and the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Follow her on Twitter @iamcrunkadelic, where she shares random thoughts, feminist musings, and obnoxiously live tweets during Scandal.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Chanel is a doctoral candidate and a university administrator.  She sees herself as a scholar-activist with areas of specialization in US Third World feminism, hip-hop feminism, cultural studies, critical media literacy, and critical prison studies.  She is currently completing her dissertation “Police Stay on Us Like Tattoos: Constructions of a Prison State in Hip Hop.” Her dissertation uses a US Third World feminist framework to analyze the ways in which hip-hop artists uses their cultural productions to construct their lived environments as borders between confinement and freedom.  She is a mother, wife, sister, and an amazing auntie!  She hates being put and boxes and often enjoys blasting gangsta rap in inappropriate places.  If you ask her, she’ll rap Biggie’s entire verse on Notorious Thugs.

 

Rachel Raimist is a filmmaker who enjoys documentary storytelling, narrative fiction filmmaking, music videos, and live event videography.  Her primary research interests are in the study of women in film, feminist filmmaking, hip-hop feminisms, and digital storytelling.

Her award-winning films have screened at festivals such as South By Southwest, Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, San Jose Cinequest and Women in the Director’s Chair, and on international television outlets.  She is one of the founding curators of B-Girl Be: A Celebration of Women in Hip-Hop at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, MN. In 1999 the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota named the department’s media center as The Rachel Raimist Feminist Media Center.  Her first book, Home Girls Makes Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (co-edited with Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, and Aisha Durham) was published in 2012.

She holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Raimist also earned a B.A. in 1995 and a M.F.A. in 1999 in Directing from the UCLA School of Film and Television, and a M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Minnesota.

FMI, check out her website http://www.rachelmakesmovies.com