Imani Perry

National Book Award-Winning Author

Imani Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, and Oprah Daily. An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South, the book offers a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America. Her previous works include Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Looking for Lorraine, May We Forever Stand, and others.

The author’s most recent work of nonfiction, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture from indigo to Louis Armstrong and beyond. In this poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original book, the author uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. With starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, in Black in Blues Perry “establishes herself as the most important interpreter of Black life in our time,” says Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again.

The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform Perry’s work as a critically acclaimed author and professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, and she was the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2023.