Jamila Lyiscott

Jamila Lyiscott aka, Dr. J, is an award-winning community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, and previously led the journal of Equity & Excellence in Education as an Editor-in-Chief. Dr. J’s research and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life globally. Her grant-funded research examines the liberatory capacity of language and culture in the lives of youth of color, racial healing, youth-led activism, and the power of the African Diaspora to transgress coloniality.

Dr. J is most well known for being featured on TED.com where her video, ‘3 Ways to Speak English,’ has been viewed over 5 million times. As a testament to her commitment to bridging public and academic scholarship, along with being featured on NPR, BBC Radio, Hulu, Cosmopolitan, NowThis, Radio New Zealand, and many other media outlets, Dr. J’s work has also been published in a range of leading academic journals. She holds multiple faculty fellowships and is the recipient of numerous awards from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Fulbright, and Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE).