Paula J. Giddings

Giddings is scholar and journalist whose contributions to feminist thought are nationally recognized as foundational. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1985) complicated the masculinist biases of the black civil rights revolution and the middle-class assumptions of women's liberation. Immediately recognized by The New York Times Book Review for its "jarringly fresh interpretation," her first book fulfilled predictions that it would become a prime sourcebook. It has been translated into several major foreign languages. In Search of Sisterhood (1988), an institutional study of the influential black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, garnered comparable praise. Her biography of the civil rights icon Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008) is a genre template. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography,  the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.