Robert Reid-Pharr is a critical essayist and Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center [1]. He has frequently collaborated with noted science fiction author Samuel R. Delany at panels and through writing. His essays have appeared in, among other places, Callaloo, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, Women and Performance, The African American Review, American Literary History, Fuse, AfterImage, Radical America, American Literature, Gay Community News, and the Washington Blade. He was a 2002-03 research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. A prolific public speaker, he had a part in the film The Watermelon Woman directed by Cheryl Dunye.
In addition to the CUNY Graduate Center he has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, the University of Oregon, and Swarthmore College. His collection of essays, Black Gay Man, won the 2002 award for Best Gay Non-fiction given by the Publishing Triangle. His book, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, is a finalist for a Lambda Book Award. He worked with the now defunct Gay Rights National Lobby and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. In that capacity he became associated with such black gay literary and political figures as Essex Hemphill, Gil Gerald and Barbara Smith. A native North Carolinian, he holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as a Ph.D. from Yale. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.