Tamura Lomax

Biography

Tamura Lomax is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from Vanderbilt University in Religion, where she specialized in Black Religious History and Black Diaspora Studies. She also developed expertise in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies.

In May 2025, Dr. Lomax will publish her second monograph, Freeing Black Girls: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering with Duke University Press. Also, in production with Duke University Press is her third monograph, Loving Black Boys: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering. She describes the books as “Lordeian/Baldwinian sacred black feminist dialectic narratives,” which merge historical and scholarly analysis with personal narratives. In other words, drawing from the influences of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, bell hooks, and so many others, the books deploy the personal, which is political, to connect the streets with the ivory tower through a blend of intellectual rigor and biographical storytelling, creating a dynamic that transcends intellectualism for the sake of intellectualism. In 2018, Dr. Lomax published her first monograph Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture with Duke University Press. In addition, she organized and guest edited “Black Bodies in Ecstasy: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Politics of Pleasure,” a special issue published with Black Theology: An International Journal. In 2014, she published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions with Palgrave Macmillan, a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan.

Dr. Lomax isn’t solely a writer and researcher. She’s a scholar-activist. In 2017, she co-organized “Our History, Our Future: A Multigenerational Human Rights Conference” at Boston University, which brought together 1960s Civil Rights and Black Panther Party activists with Black Lives Matter activists. And in 2011, Dr. Lomax co-founded The Feminist Wire (TFW), an online publication committed to feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist socio-political critique. Her vision is to create space for justice work through critical conversation, exchange, mass-mediation, and dynamic accessible education. Her hope is to bring academic expertise to the streets and vice versa. Since its founding, TFW has published close to 3,000 intersectional and justice centered scholarly essays, including the original Black Lives Matter herstory by Alicia Garza in 2014; organized the very first university conference on Black Lives Matter at the University of Arizona; and coordinated various forums on topics such as Black (Academic) Women’s Health; Assata Shakur; Trayvon Martin; Disabilities; Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism within Feminism; and Mumia Abu-Jamal, Race, Gender, and the Carceral State. In addition to online publishing, TFW has a book series with the University of Arizona Press: The Feminist Wire Books: Connecting Feminisms, Race, and Social Justice.Dr. Lomax is represented by CCMNT Speakers. For booking, please contact CCMNT.