The Authors
Cora Daniels is an award-winning journalist and author. She was a long-time staff writer at Fortune, an editor at Working Mother magazine and at Consumer Reports magazine, and currently contributes regularly toEssence magazine. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Fast Company magazine, Men’s Fitness, O: The Oprah Magazine and USA Today, among others. As an author, Cora has been called “dynamic”, “perceptive”, and “a powerful voice.” Her latest work is Impolite Conversations: on RACE, POLITICS, SEX, MONEY, and RELIGION (Simon & Schuster, 2014). In it, she teamed up with cultural anthropologist, John L. Jackson, Jr., to put forth a series of candid essays on America’s top hot-button issues. These opinions may be widely held in private but are rarely heard in public. Cora’s last book, GHETTONATION: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless received critical acclaim and national press attention and continues to stir up debate. Her first book, BLACK POWER, INC was dubbed “thought provoking” by The Washington Post and a “must read” by Black Issues Book Review. A sought after expert on diversity and business issues she has served as a commentator on ABC News, CNN, CNBC, BET, NPR, and “The Charlie Rose Show”. In 2002, she spearheaded Fortune’s first ever search for the 50 most powerful Black executives in America. In 2005, her award winning Fortune cover story, The Bravest Generation, about the original Black corporate pioneers, created national attention for this overlooked part of civil rights history. Cora is a native New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in History and earned an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is also currently on the journalism faculty of New York University.
John L. Jackson, Jr., is Dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. He also is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Africana Studies, and Anthropology in the Standing Faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Standing Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences. Before coming to Penn, Jackson taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and spent three years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jackson received his B.A. in Communications (Radio, TV, Film) from Howard University in Washington D.C. and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York City. As a filmmaker, Jackson has produced a feature-length fiction film, documentaries, and film-shorts that have screened at film festivals internationally. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University’s Milton Fund, and the Lilly Endowment (during a year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina). He has published several books, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic, 2008), and Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013). His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012).
Impolite Conversations 