Mapping Malcolm Book Launch

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is an independent writer, educator and cultural curator. Her work explores the intersections of the built environment, contemporary art, and social-movement history. She currently teaches at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, and was formerly the Director of Institutional Advancement at The Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. Her work has been published by The Cut, New York Magazine, ARTnews, Artforum, Volume Gallery and more. Najha holds a BS and MTS in African and African American comparative religious histories from Guilford College and Harvard Divinity School. She was also a 2021–2022 Community Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Najha was raised in and currently resides in Harlem.

Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five award-win- ning books: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022); Owed (Penguin, 2020); Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020); and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016). For his writing, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.

Denise Lim is an assistant professor in Art and Design History and Theory at The New School’s Parsons School of Design. Her work focuses on the material and visual cultures of diverse African communities, including South Africa’s rich cultural heritage in art, architecture, and design.

Nsenga Knight is an Afro-Caribbean American Muslim artist from Brooklyn, New York. Knight has exhibited her work at many prestigious galleries and museums across the United States and internationally, in venues such as the Drawing Center, New York; Project Rowhouses, Houston; Berman Art Museum; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; MoMA PS1; the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo; New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the 2022–2024 In Situ Artist Fellowship at the Queens Museum in New York, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Southern Constellations Fellowship. She has held many artist residencies, including at BRIC House in Brooklyn, the Drawing Center in New York, and Elsewhere Museum in North Carolina. Knight earned an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in film production at Howard University.

Akemi Kochiyama is a Harlem-based writer and scholar-activist whose work is focused on community-building, solidarity, and social justice. The granddaughter of Yuri Kochiyama, she is co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project and co-editor of Passing It On: A Memoir by Yuri Kochiyama. A doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology, her dissertation and research is about the impact of Yuri Kochiyama’s personal and political practice in support of human rights, radical solidarity, and multicultural com- munity-building on BIPOC activists, educators, and artists working in these areas today.

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer, designer, and curator pursuing a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her research explores Black American spatial histories of play, performance, art, and sonics. She has written for Aperture, The Avery Review, Arts.Black, e-flux Criticism, Gagosian Quarterly, among others. As an arts administrator, Jones held appointments at The Laundromat Project, Norton Museum of Art, New Museum’s IdeasCity platform, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Darien Alexander Williams is an assistant professor in the Macro Practice Department at Boston University, with a focus on climate and environmental justice. His research broadly engages Black and Muslim urban planning history, hurricane disaster recovery, and community organizing, and more specifically examines methods of counter-institution-building developed by the Nation of Islam as it grappled with segregation and land clearance in urban neighborhoods across the twentieth century. He is currently an organizer for the Queer Muslims of Boston, a grassroots organization that builds social and spiritual space for LGBTQ Muslims across New England.