I am daughter of Mary & Bill – a Hip Hop generation Blackgirl from Chicago who uses several modalities to co-construct, embody, and share knowledges.

professional bio

M. Billye Sankofa Waters, Ph.D. – daughter of Mary and Bill – is a Hip Hop generation Blackgirl from Chicago who uses several modalities to co-construct, embody, and share knowledges. She has 25+ professional years in revolving capacities as a writer, educator, and artist. Her praxis centers intergenerational Black storytelling rooted in Black feminisms, critical race theory, qualitative inquiry, liberatory education practices and graphic design. She is creator of #BlackFolxAreRich® and currently an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Washington Tacoma.
 
Since 1995, she has crafted her skills as a journalist and has been invited to interview folx across disciplines such as Quincy Jones, Patrisse Cullors, and Nikki Giovanni. In 2005, she earned her B.A. in Fiction Writing and was the first graduate of the Black World Studies program at Columbia College Chicago. In 2009 and 2012, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Education from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill conducting asset-based research that centered the lives of Blackgirls and Black mothers. Through formal writing training at both institutions, she developed workshops that emphasize effective communication, positionality, creativity, and decoloniality in writing, which she conducts with partners in K12 schools, universities and community spaces across the U.S. and Southern Africa. She founded the non-profit Blackgirl Gold Unapologetic, Inc. (BGU), which between 2018-2024, triennially provided over $11K in scholarships and awards to U.S. Blackgirls. In 2021, she began the Black Storytellers Project (BSP) to interview and "quilt" Black folx's stories across the Diaspora.

Sankofa Waters is the author of Penetrated Soul: somethingsihadtorelease, We Can Speak for Ourselves: Parent Involvement and Ideologies of Black Mothers in Chicago; co-editor of The Lauryn Hill Reader w/ Bettina L. Love and Venus Evans-Winters and How We Got Here: The Role of Critical Mentoring and Social Justice Praxis w/ the late Marta Sánchez.