National Women’s Studies Association and the University of Illinois Press are pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 First Book Prize!

Cinnamon Williams, University of Florida

Slave of a Slave No More: Gender, Domestic Labor, and Black Feminist Theories of Domestic Life, 1967-1987

Cinnamon Williams is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida. Williams’ research interrogates how gender continues to organize and constrain Black domestic life. Her book project charts a Black feminist tradition of marking the domestic as a problem for Black women throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. She holds her PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University.

Michaela Machicote, Johns Hopkins University

Jezebel By Another Name: Black Women, Carceral Geography and the Practice of Marronage in Chicago

Michaela Machicote, Ph.D., is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Science department at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her doctoral degree in African and African Diaspora Studies and her master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, where she became a member of the Cite Black Women Collective. Her work examines Black women and femmes’ experiences with and resistance to state and urban violence in Chicago, Illinois. Her research interests include race and identity, (Afro) Latinidad, Black social movements, abolition, state violence, urban marronage, digital humanities, and community-based forms of healing and spiritual practices. She is also a poet and visual artist, and writes short stories in her free time.

For more information on the prize, visit https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/NWSAPrize.html