<p>A renowned cultural critic, feminist scholar, and award-winning author, who coined the term “Know-Your-Place Aggression, Koritha analyzes American culture to empower audiences and advocate for social equity.</p><p>Her first book, <em>Living with Lynching</em>, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). Her second book, <em>From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture</em>, appeared in August 2020 and was named a Best Book of 2020 by <em>Ms. Magazine</em> and <em>Black Perspectives</em> and a <em>CHOICE</em> Outstanding Academic Title in 2021. She is also editor of an edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel <em>Iola Leroy</em> and of Incidents in the <em>Life of a Slave Girl</em> by Harriet Jacobs, which became the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman when it was published in 1861. Mitchell’s scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” and “Love in Action,” which identifies similarities between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities. Mitchell’s public commentary has appeared in <em>Time</em>, CNN, <em>The Washington Post</em>, <em>Good Morning America</em>, the <em>Los Angeles Review of Books</em>, among others, and she received a Progressive Women's Voices IMPACT Award from the Women's Media Center in 2023. </p><p>As the first in her family to graduate from college, Koritha understands that the knowledge needed to succeed in various environments may seem like common sense, but it is anything but natural and self-evident. She therefore enjoys equipping audiences with information that will demystify the challenges they encounter. Likewise, having devoted decades to studying violence, Koritha understands the different forms it can take. Discursive violence may be bloodless, but it is quite damaging. She therefore enjoys equipping audiences to see how, when institutions and cultures have been designed for injustice and inequity, violence is built into what is most commonly said and done.</p>
Award-Winning Author, Feminist Scholar, Cultural Critic
<ul><li><strong>Lynching and Anti-LGBT Violence: Making the Connection</strong></li><li>The violence plaguing LGBT communities has much in common with the brutal practice of lynching, which was at its height from the 1890s to the 1930s. Ultimately, both forms of aggression are designed to deny targeted groups recognition as citizens. Having studied racial violence for decades, award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell brought this expertise to her examination of the data on anti-LGBT attacks collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP). Her research revealed striking similarities between lynching at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. By drawing out those parallels, Mitchell equips audiences with historically grounded knowledge that can encourage coalitions and make environments less hostile for more people.</li><li><strong>What if Americans Had Listened to Black Women of the 1800s?</strong></li><li> Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell shares insights from editing the work of Harriet Jacobs while witnessing the Supreme Court’s commitment to ending abortion access and limiting the right to vote. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. Despite facing obstacles typically avoided by white women and Black men, Jacobs published her life story in 1861. This work sheds light on the experience of a particular demographic—nineteenth-century Black women. In the process, it exposes American culture’s fundamental beliefs as the nation built its foundation on treating Black women not as people but as chattels, moveable pieces of property. Using Harriet Jacobs as a case study, Mitchell shows how Black women were model citizens who could not vote. Even while enslaved, Jacobs exemplified the critical thinking of engaged citizenship. Her writing exposes the brutally inventive creativity of the nation’s most vaunted nonfiction texts. Jacobs proves to be unequivocal: legal statutes exert very real pressure on her life, but they rely on the relentlessly reiterated fiction that she is not fully human and deserves no rights</li><li><strong>Homemade Citizenship: All But Inviting Injury</strong></li><li>Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell discusses how, even when they embody everything the nation claims to respect, African Americans cannot count on being treated like citizens. Consider, for example, the Black soldiers and nurses who served in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII only to be disfranchised and denigrated. Or, consider the Ivy League-educated constitutional lawyer who rose to the office of president only to face demands that he “show his papers,” his birth certificate and academic transcripts. Though their success will not likely bring them the safety and respectability it should, African Americans seem to cling to all that purportedly makes one an ideal citizen, including the heteronormative nuclear family and its traditional household. What does this pattern of investing against the odds reveal about African American culture? The short answer: homemade citizenship.</li></ul>