Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a writer, sociologist, and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS). She is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy and THICK: and Other Essays (The New Press, 2019), which situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its center. THICK won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.

In 2020, McMillan Cottom received the Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her work "at the confluence of race, gender, education, and digital technology."