In Conversation: On Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence

Anita F. Hill is an American lawyer and academic, and a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home, and Speaking Truth to Power. Hill has also written widely on issues of race and gender in publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Critical Race Feminism, and others. She became a national figure in 1991 when, decades before the emergence of the #MeToo movement, she accused then United States Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment. Hill’s Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence (Viking) is a story of America’s long reckoning with gender violence, one that offers insights into its roots and paths to creating dialogue and substantive change. In her view, the issues of gender violence, touching on sex, race, age, and power, are as urgent today as they were when she testified. Publishers Weekly in a starred review called Believing “incisive and impassioned ... Hill’s inspiring personal history, eloquently constructed arguments, and dogged persistence in shining a light on the topic make this an essential look at the fight against misogyny.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning author, professor, and sociologist whose work has earned national and international recognition for the urgency and depth of its incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender. Her most recent accolades include a 2020 MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She is currently an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science; a senior faculty researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at North Carolina, she was an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. As a researcher and public intellectual, she has appeared on Amanpour & Co., MSNBC, The Daily Show, and National Public Radio, and she testified before U.S. Senate subcommittees on student loan debt. She is also an influential voice on Twitter and co-host of Hear to Slay, a Black feminist podcast with writer Roxane Gay. McMillan Cottom’s most recent book is THICK: And Other Essays (The New Press), a critically acclaimed Amazon bestseller that situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its center. THICK won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.