Contributors

Yvette Johnson Yvette Johnson co-produced a film called, "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012.  In addition to being a filmmaker she is a public speaker, a workshop facilitator, and her first book, "Searching for Booker Wright," will be released by Simon and Schuster in February 2016.  Yvette's search to understand her grandfather's story and was the subject of a one-hour Dateline episode, a full page spread in the New York Times, NPR, Democracy Now and several other media outlets.  To learn more about Yvette please visit her professional website and/or her blog Neal A. Lester, PhD Dr. Lester has been a professor of English at Arizona State University since the fall 1997. His area of specialization is African American literary and cultural studies. He has published on and taught courses in African American children's literature, African American drama, African American folklore, African American images in American cinema, and black/ white interracial intimacies in American culture. Over the course of his twenty-year professional career, Dr. Lester has received numerous teaching awards and recognitions, including Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award (1993), Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award (1996), and "Distinguished Finalist" for the Professor of the Year (2001).  In 2011, Dr. Lester was elected to the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English (ADE), an affiliate of the Modern Language Association of America and has served as Associate Vice President for Humanities and Arts in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development, where his role was to promote and integrate humanities research throughout the university; an extension of the university-wide Project Humanities initiative he began in August 2010 and continues to direct.

Rachel Sondgeroth Rachel Sondgeroth is a student at Mountain View High School who found herself getting involved with Project Humanities after contacting Dr. Neal Lester for more information on his "Are We Losing Humanity" panel in Washington D.C. In addition to writing for the Breaking Bias blog, her extra-curricular activities include competing on her high school's speech and debate team, and various volunteer work. She will graduate in 2015 and plans to major in religious studies at ASU in the fall.