2026 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecturer, Tressie McMillan Cottom

Welcome Tressie McMillan Cottom. 
Dr.McMillan Cottom is a professor at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Her work has earned national and international recognition for the urgency and depth of its incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, culture, media, class, race, and gender.

Recent accolades include being named the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for her “critical perspective and analysis to some of the greatest social challenges we face today,” the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a 2025–2026 National Humanities Center Fellow. Her most recent book, THICK: And Other Essays was just listed as one of the thirty best nonfiction books of the last thirty years by the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

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