Check out Tulanian Mwende Katwiwa’s awesome interview with Melissa Harris-Perry regarding the Anna Julia Cooper Project:

Up until my sophomore year of college, I had never seen or heard the name Anna Julia Cooper in an academic setting. In 2011 however, I was walking on campus and saw a flyer for a lecture on Black Womanhood that was hosted by the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South. Curious about the topic and finding out what the Cooper Project was (the talk was given was entitled “When Race Matters: Private Bodies, Public Texts or: Why Henrietta Lack Did Not Need ‘The Help’” by Dr. Karla Holloway of Duke University), I attended the lecture and followed up afterwards with the Cooper Project, discovering along the way that the project was just as powerful and necessary to the continued exploration of Blackness in America as it’s name sake.

The Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South is a New Orleans based LLC that focuses on supporting programs, courses and research at the intersections of gender, race, and politics in the South. In 2011, Director Melissa Harris-Perry (best known for her MSNBC show of the same name ) founded the Cooper Project with seven focus areasin its multifaceted mission. Each of these focus areas centers on the importance of recognizing intersectionality in Southern contexts, and empowering individuals and communities to explore the meaning and implications of these intersections in their everyday lives. Harris-Perry has been living with her husband and 12-year-old daughter in New Orleans for the past 3 years working as a Political Science Professor at Tulane University, a host on MSNBC, and most recently, as the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project.

Full piece here.