Black Utopias

Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of books of history including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; and the National Book Critics Circle finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she has received honorary degrees from Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth. After a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design. Nell Painter lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey, and has made artists’ books in residencies such as MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, and Bogliasco. She currently serves as Madame Chairman of MacDowell.

Award-winning journalist, historian, producer, and publisher, Janus Adams is the author of eleven books and creator of the groundbreaking BackPax children’s book-and-audio series. A scholar of African American and women’s history, Adams specializes in putting current events into historical perspective. Her syndicated column appears under her own byline. She is also host of The Janus Adams Radio Show on WJFF Radio Catskill

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He formerly served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association and is currently an advisory editor for The Paris Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications.