“Over the past four decades, Barbara’s work on the front lines of a diverse array of movements has produced over two hundred books and articles. We selected the best and hardest to find pieces and combined them with a dozen new interviews commissioned exclusively for this project. In bringing together these otherwise scattered remnants of struggles and strategies into one place, we seek to facilitate a new generation of learning and leadership.”
Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks, Editors of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around
Editors Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks have worked with Barbara Smith to explore her life from her childhood to her recent work as an elected official in Albany, New York. The book includes a foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.
Alethia Jones is director of education and leadership development at 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, headquartered in New York City. Formerly an assistant professor of public policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York, she specializes in urban politics focusing on immigrant social networks and public policy formation. She is a former fellow of MIT’s Community Innovators Lab and UVA’s Miller Center Governing America in a Global Era Program. Her publications include “Identity Politics: Part of a Reinvigorated Class Politics,” which appeared in the New Labor Forum (Spring 2010) and “Immigration and Institutional Change: The Urban Origins of U.S. Postal Savings Banks” in The City and American Political Development (Routledge, 2009). She builds spaces of transformative dialogue for social change and has coauthored the “Let’s Talk Immigration!” curriculum (with Guillermo Perez) and the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) “Immigration and SEIU: Why We Care” curriculum (with Maria Robalino).
Virginia Eubanks is the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (MIT Press, 2011) and the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots economic justice and welfare rights organization, and the Popular Technology Workshops, which help community organizations and social movements link technology tools to their social justice goals. She teaches in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and is a Ford Academic Fellow at New America. She is currently at work on a new book about the use of government technologies in poor and working-class neighborhoods. She can be reached at virginia[at]digitaldeadend.com or on Twitter @PopTechWorks.
Barbara Smith has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national, cultural, and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s. Her extensive writings and activism as an independent book publisher made her among the first to define an African American women’s literary tradition and to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism in the United States. In recognition of her four decades of efforts as an author, activist and independent scholar, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, one of one thousand women from all over the globe who were nominated to call attention to women’s extreme underrepresentation as recipients of this honor. In 2012 she was chosen for the AOL and PBS multiplatform “Makers: Women Who Make America” initiative that profiles distinguished women in all walks of life who have transformed the nation. She was cofounder and publisher until 1995 of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, one of the first U.S. publishers for women of color. She resides in Albany, New York, where she is a Public Service Professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University at Albany and served two terms as a member of the City of Albany’s Common Council.
She has edited three major collections about Black women: Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue with Lorraine Bethel (1979); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott (The Feminist Press, 1982); and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983). She is also the coauthor with Elly Bulkin and Minnie Bruce Pratt of Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Firebrand Books, 1984). She is the general editor of The Reader’s Companion to U. S. Women’s History with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem (Mariner Books, 1998). A collection of her essays, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom, was published by Rutgers University Press in 1998.