Randall Kennedy & Touré

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People: A Memoir. Professor Gates has edited numerous anthologizes and has written and produced several documentaries for PBS, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.

Randall Kennedy

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is the author of Race, Crime, and the Law, a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; and Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal.

Photo Credit: Martha Stewart

Touré

Touré is the author of the novel Soul City, the story collection The Portable Promised Land, and the essay collection Never Drank the Kool Aid. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tennis Magazine, The Best American Essays, and Da Capo Best American Music Writing, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.