Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived until her family moved north to the Boston area when she was five. She frequently visited her family members who remained in the South as she grew up, and she has traveled extensively through the region throughout her life. Her background as the daughter of Black civil rights organizers, her work as an interdisciplinary scholar of African American studies, and a life split between the southern and northern US equipped Perry to write South to America, a memoir of her life as a Southerner in exile, an ode to the Black South, and a chronicle of the South’s frequently overlooked centrality to the historical and modern US.

Perry holds a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University’s School of Law and a PhD in American Studies from the same institution. She currently holds an endowed chair in African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a nationally recognized, award-winning author; South to America is her eighth book. According to the department’s public profile, “Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West […]” (“

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