Noliwe rooks biography of alberta

American academic and author

Noliwe Rooks (born 1963) is an American academic and author. She is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and is the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at Brown.^[1] She previously held the W.E.B.

Du Bois Professorship of Literature at Cornell University.^[2]

Early life and education

Rooks was born in 1963 to Belvie Rooks, a writer from the Fillmore District in San Francisco.^[3] Rooks spent her childhood in San Francisco with her mother and in Florida with her father and grandmother.^[3] She also traveled with her mother to Africa and the Caribbean.^[3]

Rooks earned her B.A.

in English from Spelman College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa.^[4]

Career

By 1996, Rooks was one of the first Black professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas C