Biography

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College, where she has been a faculty member since 1971. She is also adjunct professor at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University. Scholars and activists hold Beverly in high esteem as a pioneer of black feminism and an integral part of the movement to institute women’s studies in American academia. Through her scholarship, advocacy and action, Beverly lead the way to establishing a women’s studies program in a historically Black college.

 In 1980, Beverly co-edited and published the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Other seminal texts she has published include Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995); and the anthology Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (2001), of which she was co-editor. In 1983, Beverly co-founded and was co-editor of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women, a journal dedicated to the experiences of women of African descent Most recently, she co-authored the book Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (2003).