UVA Division for Community Engagement and Equal Opportunity Presents: Community MLK Celebration Keynote Event

Dr. Imani Perry will deliver the 2026 Community MLK Celebration keynote address on January 22, 2026.

This event is free and open to the public.

Born just nine years after the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Perry’s work reflects the deeply complex history of Black thought, art, and imagination. Her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture from indigo to Louis Armstrong and beyond. A finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize, Black in Blues “establishes [Perry] as the most important interpreter of Black life in our time…This is an extraordinary book” (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again and We Are the Leaders).

Her National Book Award-winning book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is a narrative journey through the American South, in which Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A “rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America” (Publishers Weekly), South by America defies classification. Writing in The New York Times, Tayari Jones named it, “an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even Americanness itself… [that] is determined to provoke a return to the other legacy of the South, the ever-urgent struggle toward freedom.” South to America was named a best book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, and Oprah Daily.

Perry’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center, and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.