This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, who teaches in the Department of English at Coppin State University. In addition to a number of collections of poetry and edited volumes on education and race, she is poet laureate of Prince George’s County in Maryland. In this conversation, we discuss the place of education in the formation of the Black Studies imagination and the centrality of creative work for the study of Black life and liberations struggle.