Biography

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is one of the world’s foremost historians of racism and a leading antiracist scholar. He is Professor of History at Howard University, and the founding director of the Howard Institute for Advanced Study.

He is a National Book Award-winning author of seventeen books for adults and children, including eleven New York Times Best Sellers, five of which were #1 New York Times Best Sellers. His books have been translated into multiple languages and republished throughout North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Dr. Kendi’s first book, The Black Campus Movement: A History of Black Student Activism, chronicles antiracist organizing among Black students at historically Black and White colleges and universities in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times Best Seller.

Stamped from the Beginning has been adapted into an award winning and #1 New York Times Best Selling young adult book with Jason Reynolds, a #1 New York Times middle grade book with Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul, and a graphic novel with Joel Christian Gill that was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. The film adaptation debuted on Netflix in 2023 with Dr. Kendi as Executive Producer. “Stamped from the Beginning” was honored on the Oscar shortlist for Documentary Feature Film, nominated for an Emmy Award and NAACP Image Award, and won the Best Documentary from the African American Film Critics Association and the Grierson Award for Best History Documentary. 

Dr. Kendi authored How to Be an Antiracist, a #1 New York Times Best Seller and international best seller. It made several Best Books of 2019 lists and was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” How to Be an Antiracist was adapted for young adult readers with Nic Stone. His other books for young people include the best sellers Antiracist Baby, Goodnight Racism, and Malcolm Lives! The Official Biography of Malcolm X for Young Readers

Dr. Kendi edited with Dr. Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. They assembled a Black community of 80 writers and 10 poets to write the history of a community. Four Hundred Souls was a #1 New York Times Best Seller and finalist for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction from the American Library Association. Dr. Kendi published How to Raise an Antiracist, an instant New York Times Best Seller. An accessible and thoroughly researched book for parents, caregivers and educators, the Los Angeles Times praised How to Raise an Antiracist for combining “his personal experience as a parent with his scholarly expertise in showing how racism affects every step of a child’s life.” 

Dr. Kendi is in the process of producing a series of six children's books adapted from the writings and collected folklore of the legendary Zora Neale Hurston, who was a Howard University student. He has already published Magnolia Flower, a picture book illustrated by Loveis Wise, about an Afro-Indigenous girl who longs for freedom and love—and finds both. The second, The Making of Butterflies, illustrated by Kah Yangni, is a board that that opens the imagination of babies about the work of creation and how the world came to be. The third book in the series adapted for young readers Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and it debuted as a New York Times Best Seller. 

Dr. Kendi received his doctorate and master's degrees at Temple University, and undergraduate degrees from Florida A&M University. He has published academic essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, and Journal of African American Studies. He co-edits the Black Power Series at NYU Press with historian Ashley Farmer.

Dr. Kendi has published op-eds in numerous periodicals, including The Emancipator, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, London Review, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and Paris Review. He commented on a series of international, national, and local media outlets. A highly sought after public speaker, Dr. Kendi has delivered thousands of addresses over the years at colleges and universities, bookstores, festivals, conferences, libraries, churches, museums, and other institutions in the United States and around the world.

Dr. Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He has also resided at The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as the American Historical Association’s 2010-2011 J. Franklin Jameson Fellow in American History. He was also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Dr. Kendi was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship and elected to the Society of American Historians. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.