DR. IBRAM X. KENDI is a National Book Award-winning author of sixteen books for adults and children, including ten New York Times bestsellers—five of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor.

Dr. Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest author to win that award. He also authored the international bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, which was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” Dr. Kendi’s other bestsellers include How to Raise an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.

LONG BIOGRAPHY

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI is one of the world’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. He is a National Book Award-winning author of sixteen books for adults and children, including ten New York Times bestsellers—five of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. His books have been translated into multiple languages and republished throughout North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research in the United States. Dr. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News Racial Justice Contributor. In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Grant.”

Dr. Kendi’s first book, The Black Campus Movement, a history of Black student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Dr. Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. He grew up dreaming about playing in the NBA (National Basketball Association), and ironically, he ended up joining the other NBA. The film adaptation came out on Netflix in 2023. Stamped from the Beginning debuted on the top 10 watched movies on Netflix and was honored on the Oscar shortlist for Documentary Feature Film. It was nominated for a NAACP Image Award and won the Best Documentary from the African American Film Critics Association.

In 2019, Dr. Kendi authored How to Be an Antiracist, a #1 New York Times bestseller and international bestseller. It made several Best Books of 2019 lists and was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” The next year, Dr. Kendi partnered with Jason Reynolds on a young adult remix of Stamped from the Beginning, which they titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. Stamped Jr.—as they call it—was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the GoodReads Choice Award and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, and a NAACP Image Award. In 2020, Dr. Kendi also authored the board book and picture book, Antiracist Baby. Illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky, Antiracist Baby debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became a widely popular introduction to antiracism for the youngest of people.

In 2021, Dr. Kendi edited with Dr. Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. They assembled a Black community of 80 writers and 10 poets to write the history of a community. Four Hundred Souls debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became a finalist for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction from the American Library Association. Months after Four Hundred Souls, Dr. Kendi, Jason Reynolds, and Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul published Stamped for Kids. An adaptation of Stamped Jr. for middle graders that Kirkus found to be "exhilarating, excellent, necessary,” Stamped for Kids became a #1 New York Times bestseller.

In 2021, Dr. Kendi launched three major media projects. He hosted the first season of his action podcast Be Antiracist. He worked with his colleagues at the BU Center for Antiracist Research to found The Emancipator, a multimedia digital platform inspired by the first abolitionist newspaper in the 19th century that strives to reframe the conversation on racial justice and equity. Dr. Kendi also launched his production shingle, Maroon Visions, to produce film and television projects. The first project was Skin in the Game, a docuseries examining the intersection of race, sport, and society, co-produced by Religion of Sports and Andscape that debuted on ESPN+ in 2023.

In 2022, Dr. Kendi published two instant New York Times bestsellers: How to Raise an Antiracist and Goodnight Racism, a picture book illustrated by Cbabi Bayoc. An accessible and thoroughly researched book for parents, caregivers and educators, the Los Angeles Times praised How to Raise an Antiracist for combining “his personal experience as a parent with his scholarly expertise in showing how racism affects every step of a child’s life.” The San Francisco Book Review lauded Goodnight Racism as a “lovely goodnight prayer for children” while Kirkus Reviews called it “an inspiring read to help realize dreams for a better future for all.”

That year, Dr. Kendi also published Magnolia Flower, a picture book illustrated by Loveis Wise, about an Afro-Indigenous girl who longs for freedom and love—and finds both. This is the first of a series of six children's books that Dr. Kendi is adapting based on the writings and collected folklore of the legendary Zora Neale Hurston. The second, The Making of Butterflies, illustrated by Kah Yangni, came out on March 7, 2023. This board book, which opens the imagination of babies about the work of creation and how the world came to be, is based on a fun folktale Hurston collected.

Weeks before The Making of Butterflies arrived, Dr. Kendi partnered with Nic Stone on a young adult adaption of How to Be an Antiracist. This book, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist, became an instant sensation, debuting on the New York Times bestseller list. Dr. Kendi and Stone also produced The (Young) Antiracist’s Workbook for young changemakers, not unlike Be Antiracist, a workbook Dr. Kendi wrote for adults. In 2023, Kendi also published Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America, with cartoonist Joel Christian Gill, which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award.

Dr. Kendi has published fourteen academic essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. He co-edits the Black Power Series at NYU Press with historian Ashley Farmer.

Dr. Kendi has published op-eds in numerous periodicals, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, London Review, Time, Salon, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Paris Review, Black Perspectives, Time, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He commented on a series of international, national, and local media outlets, such as CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, PBS, BBC, Democracy Now, OWN, BET, and Sirius XM. A sought after public speaker, Dr. Kendi has delivered thousands of addresses over the years at colleges and universities, bookstores, festivals, conferences, libraries, churches, museums, and other institutions in the United States and around the world.

Dr. Kendi enjoys joking it up with friends and family, partaking in African American culture, weight-lifting, reading provocative books, discussing the issues of the day with open-minded people, and hoping and pressing for the day the New York Knicks will win an NBA championship and for the day this nation and world will be ruled by the best of humanity.

In 2013, he changed his middle name from Henry to Xolani (meaning "Peace" in Zulu) and surname from Rogers to Kendi when he wed Dr. Sadiqa Kendi, a pediatric emergency physician. They chose their new name together and unveiled “Kendi,” meaning "loved one" in Meru, to their family and friends at their wedding. Their wedding photos were featured in Essence Magazine, including the bride’s stunningly beautiful gold dress.

Dr. Kendi was born in 1982 to parents who came of age during the Black power movement in New York City. They were activist Christians inspired by Black liberation theology. While Dr. Kendi was in high school, his family moved from Jamaica, Queens, to Manassas, Virginia. He traveled further south and attended Florida A&M University, where he majored in journalism. He initially aspired for a career in sports journalism, freelancing for several Florida newspapers, and interning at USA Today Sports Weekly, as well as in the sports sections of the Mobile Register and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By the end of his tenure at FAMU, he had become alienated from sports journalism and increasingly became interested in engaging in racial justice work. He picked up a second major in African American Studies and graduated in 2004.

After interning for six months at The Virginian Pilot, Dr. Kendi pursued his graduate studies. At 27 years old, he earned his doctoral degree in African American Studies from Temple University in 2010.

Kendi has taught at SUNY Oneonta, SUNY Albany, the University of Florida, and American University. In 2017, he became a full professor, the highest professorial rank, at 34 years old. In 2020, Boston University awarded him an endowed professorship, the highest academic award a University can bestow on a faculty member. BU’s endowed Andrew W. Mellon Professorship has been held by only one other person in the University’s history: Elie Wiesel, the late Holocaust survivor and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in 2016.

Dr. Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He has also resided at The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as the American Historical Association’s 2010-2011 J. Franklin Jameson Fellow in American History. In the summer of 2011, he lived in Chicago as a short-term fellow in African American Studies through the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of other universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, University of Chicago, Wayne State University, Emory University, Duke University, Princeton University, UCLA, Washington University, Wake Forest University, and the historical societies of Kentucky and Southern California. He was also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.

The Root 100 listed him as the tenth most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45 and the most influential college professor. Dr. Kendi was awarded the distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship. He was elected to the prestigious Society of American Historians and named a Young Global Leader, the World Economic Forum's annual class of the most promising leaders around the globe under the age of 40.

Kendi’s newest book is an adaptation for young readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, which debuted as a New York Times Best Seller. Barracoon was Kendi’s tenth best seller. He is one of the most widely read and esteemed authors in the world.

He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.