Backtalker: An American Memoir

Backtalker: An American Memoir

Publication Date

5-2026

Description

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America — at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Race | Legal Biography

ISBN

9781982181000

Publisher

Simon & Schuster

City

New York, NY

Reviews

"Backtalker charts Crenshaw’s extraordinary journey from precocious child to renowned public intellectual.... A rousing call to see the story of the future as one in which ‘the spirit of freedom was nurtured by talking back.’”
—Colin Grant, The New York Times

"[Crenshaw] frames her life and her remarkably influential career as one long fight against various forms of exclusion and unfairness.... The reasonable conclusions of a clear-eyed intellectual who simply refused to shut up about what she witnessed and experienced."
—Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker

“A beautifully written, compelling and insightful memoir from the extraordinary intellectual, activist and scholar who has shaped critical discourse in America. A moving and powerful read.”
—Bryan Stevenson

“A searing, defiant and deeply inspiring memoir for our times from one of America's greatest architects of justice.”
—V (formerly Eve Ensler)

“It is rare that creators of movements that shake the world use the memoir form to honestly and precisely explore how their will to change was created. Kimberlé Crenshaw has made a fleshy piece of theory, a foundational book for this nation, a moving memoir that will continue to build on the monumental work Crenshaw has already done. We will thankfully be feeling the work of this book for generations.”
—Kiese Laymon

“Kimberlé Crenshaw is one of America’s most original legal thinkers, a pioneering theorist whose scholarship has transformed the way we think about race, gender, and the law. Now in Backtalker, her powerful new memoir, she reminds us of the greatest teacher of all: experience. Here is a compelling account of the making not only of a visionary mind on the front lines of change, but of the ‘we’ that binds us to one another in families, communities, and in the nation as a whole.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“Her ideas have shaped generations of thinkers and activists globally. Now, with Backtalker, we come to understand the people and contexts that have given shape to Kimberlé Crenshaw, her values and her sensibilities. This in-depth self-portrait reveals a woman of great depth, courage, and conviction — a truth teller and justice seeker. It is a tale as unique and compelling as its author, a much needed story for our times and beyond.”
—Farah Jasmine Griffin

Backtalker: An American Memoir

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