I’ve written essays, reviews, and profiles for The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review, New York, and The Atlantic. Edition: 1 Description: 1 online resource (297 pages) Series: The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture Ser. In 2019, I was also awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American studies for May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which also received the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Nonfiction. I have received a number of awards for my writing, including a 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for my book Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which also received the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. In 2021 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History and in 2019 I was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts for literature. My subjects include history, race, gender, literature, and music. Now I am an eclectic scholar and writer of creative nonfiction. in American studies and a law degree from Harvard, and I began my academic career as a law professor who taught contracts and American legal history. I’m the author of seven books, the most recent of which is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. I am the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where I also am affiliated with the programs in gender and sexuality studies and jazz studies.

Drawing on a wide array of sources, Perry uses 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' as a window on the powerful ways African Americans have used music and culture to organize, mourn, challenge, and celebrate for more than a century.My name is Imani Perry. In this rich, poignant, and readable work, Imani Perry tells the story of the Black National Anthem as it traveled from South to North, from civil rights to black power, and from countless family reunions to Carnegie Hall and the Oval Office.

Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life up through the present day. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story.

The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history.

May we forever stand