Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, and a Professor of History at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School and the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. For her epic work, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Gordon-Reed was awarded the 2009 Pultizer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, along with 12 other awards.  She was the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in History and the first black female to win the National Book Award in the Non-Fiction category.  Gordon-Reed was awarded a 2009 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and was named a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in 2010.  Among her other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities (2009), and a Fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (2010–2011) and membership into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to The Hemingses of Monticello, Gordon-Reed's published works include the groundbreaking Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997); Vernon Can Read: A Memoir, which she co-wrote with the famed civil rights leader, lawyer, and presidential advisor, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, a collection of scholarly essays she edited examining the role and impact of race in significant American legal cases over the last 200 years; and, in 2011, Andrew Johnson, a short biography of America's 17th president.