Cecil Brown is senior lecturer in urban studies at Stanford University, where he is also a researcher at The Spatial History Project, and author of the novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger; Emily Gordon is a critic and poet who lives in New Haven, Conn.; Jason Purnell is an associate professor and director of Health Equity Works in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis; Paul Wagman is a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and executive with FleishmanHillard who is now an independent writer, editor, and public relations counselor; Olivia J. Williams is is a rising junior at Washington University in St. Louis majoring in African and African-American Studies. She has been published in Drake University’s literary journal Periphery and Washington University’s independent Black magazine RIZE. Her research paper, “Sustenance Abuse: Anorexia, Bulimia, & Black Women,” won the 2019 Dean James E. McLeod First-Year Writing Prize. The Common Reader is staffed by Professor Gerald Early, staff writers Jeannette Cooperman and John Griswold, and managing editor Ben Fulton.
