I am a writer, historian, and legal scholar who also teaches at the Johns Hopkins University. I am also the prize-winning author of several books. My latest - THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: AN AMERICAN FAMILY MEMOIR - is a big departure for me, turning my historian's lens toward my own family and myself. I've gone deep into who, as Americans, we call family and how that has changed across generations. It's a story that runs from slavery and sexual violence and anti-miscegenation laws to Jim Crow and civil rights. Throughout, my questions are about how color and the line it is said to draw across our lives and our national landscape is a legal fact and an everyday fiction.My past books include Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018) and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture (2007,) and Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015.)