Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is an Emmy Award-winning writer, a professor of Constitutional Law and Africa Studies at John Jay College (CUNY), civil rights attorney, and playwright. She is the author of She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power; Race, Law, and American Society; The Voting Rights War; SHOT: Caught a Soul, and The Black Woman: 400 Years of Perseverance, among others. Her poetry has appeared in Penumbra; short story in Love Bites Anthology; and essays in the Milwaukee Courier, TIME.com, CNN.com, Bloomberg.com, NBConline.com, We Refuse to be Silent: Women’s Voices on Justice for Black Men (Broadleaf), and academic journals. Her work includes stage-play productions of My Juilliard, Killing Me Softly, and Waverly Place, a recent film Before 1619: She Took Justice, and forthcoming book A Protest History of the United States (Beacon), covering 500 years of selected protests and protesters, using primary sources, law, memoir, and interviews. 

Gloria was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at HKS, focused on creativity, activism, and public policy. She attended the Sarah Lawrence MFA playwriting program and graduated from the Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She previously taught in the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College. Gloria litigated cases for the SPLC in Alabama, Community Legal Services, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., and was a law clerk in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Her work received a Pulitzer Center grant, NewYorkRep Theatre Award, Foreword INDIE Award, ABA Silver Gavel Award, Phillis Wheatley Award, Maxine W. Smith Literary Award, American Film Award, Emmy Award, among others, with support from grants and residencies. She is completing a novel of historical fiction.