LaKisha Michelle Simmons is the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (2015), which won the Southern Association for Women Historians' Julia Cherry Spruill Prize and received an honorable mention for the Association of Black Women Historians' Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award. She has published articles in American Quarterly, Gender & History, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. Simmons is an assistant professor of history and women's studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her doctorate. Before coming back to Michigan, she taught at Davidson College and at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
NEW IN 2022: The Global History of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press)
Simmons is also a co-creator and -organizer of the Global History of Black Girlhood conference, which first convened at the University of Virginia in 2017. She is the coeditor of The Global History of Black Girlhood. She is also currently writing a book on the history of black motherhood called "Segregated Motherhood," which explores reproductive health and histories of love and loss in black families, and beginning a new research project on black women's labor in rural Louisiana since Reconstruction.
The #BlackLivesMatter civil rights movement is bringing international attention to issues of police brutality and the "school to prison pipeline" in African Americans' lives. Many people have focused on the dangers black men and boys face, but sometimes lost in this discussion are black girls' encounters with these same systems of violence. Professor Simmons presents a short history of violence against African American girls and then discusses the injustices black girls face today. She also highlights activism that centers both race and gender. African American youth have been speaking out, proclaiming that #BlackGirlsMatter, insisting that we understand how gender affects experiences of racial violence in America.