Professor Blair LM Kelley

Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience ¹². She is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies, co-director of the Southern Futures Initiative, and the Director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ³. Kelley is a dedicated public historian who works to amplify the histories of Black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism ¹². Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk ⁴.