Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, PhD is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies both at Spelman College. She taught Women’s Studies at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies.

At 16, she attended Spelman College where she majored in English. She graduated with honors and went on to attend Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. She earned her Master’s in English from Atlanta University. Her thesis was entitled, Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.

Dr. Guy-Sheftall joined the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1971 she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English Department. She has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: and Visions of Black Women in Literature.

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Director of Women’s Research & Resource Center, Chair of Comparative Women’s Studies, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies

Academic administrator and black women’s studies professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall was born on June 1, 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee to Walter and Ernestine Varnado-Guy