Monday, Apr 27, 2026 4:00 PM

Location:
Cosby Auditorium, Spelman College
350 Spelman Lane SW
Atlanta, GA 30314

One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.

Spelman College welcomes author Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in honor of her new book, “Backtalker: An American Memoir.” Crenshaw will appear in conversation with Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory and author of the National Book Award-nominated “One Person, No Vote.”

Copies of “Backtalker” will be available for purchase at the venue. This event is free and open to the public.

Photo I.D. is required by our Spelman College Public Safety Department to enter our gated campus. And parking is available for a small fee in our Spelman College parking deck subject to availability.

About the Book

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

“Backtalker” is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.

About the Author

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., hosts the podcast “Intersectionality Matters!,” and has appeared as a commentator on media outlets including MSNBC and NPR.



About the Conversation Partner

Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,” “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960,” and “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy,” which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction; and “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.”