Eric Darnell Pritchard

Eric Darnell Pritchard is a writer, teacher, and Black queer alchemist originally from Queens, New York. Raised in Black feminist abundance by grandmother, mother, and aunt, Pritchard’s work is ancestor-led and fortified and, in the words of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “community-accountable.” Pritchard writes and teaches about literacy and rhetoric and their intersections with fashion, beauty, popular culture, identity, and power.

Pritchard is the founding director of the Community Literacies Collaboratory and an award-winning author whose books include Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy and Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams. Other writings have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Public Books, and Ebony. Pritchard’s research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute.

A proud graduate of The Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, Pritchard earned a PhD in English with distinction and an MA in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Beyond researching and writing—always among Pritchard’s first loves—joy comes from family, comic books, fashion documentaries, vintage shopping, travel, museums, and a healthy helping of television.

Learn more at Eric Darnell Pritchard’s official website.