Ruth Nicole Brown (PhD in political science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is an artist-scholar and an assistant professor in the Departments of Gender and Women's Studies and Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Black Girlhood Celebration : Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009). Chamara Jewel Kwakye (PhD in educational policy studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a scholar, storyteller, and performer.
She is currently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kwakye is currently writing a book that documents the life histories of Black women in the Academy.