Patricia Bell-Scott about the author

// Brief Bio //


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“You need to know some of the veterans of the battle whose shoulders you now stand on.”

—PAULI MURRAY to Patricia Bell-Scott, December 12, 1983

Patricia Bell-Scott is an award-winning author and professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. Her most recent book, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was named Booklist Best Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year by the American Library Association. This book was also named a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her previous books include Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, which was a featured selection of The Quality Paperback Book Club; Flat-footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives; Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters, which won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, an award-winning textbook.

Bell-Scott served for a decade as co-founding editor of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. She is a former contributing editor to Ms. Magazine. She is also a cofounder of the National Women’s Studies Association.

A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Bell-Scott lives in Athens, Georgia with her husband, Charles Vernon Underwood Jr.