Menah Pratt is the Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity and Professor of Education at Virginia Tech. She has almost 25 years of leadership experience in higher education, with a focus on large-scale institutional transformation, including previously serving at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Vanderbilt University.
Nationally and internationally recognized as a leader, scholar, and author of four books on issues of race, class, gender, culture, diversity, education, women’s leadership, and critical race feminism, Dr. Pratt was elected chair-elect for the Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the American Public Land-Grant University Association, a 250-member organization. She has also received several national awards: the 2023-2024 American Council on Education Fellowship; 2023 Top 50 Women We Admire in Virginia; 2023 Individual Winds of Change award by the Forum on Workplace Inclusion; the 2021 Inclusive Excellence Individual Leadership Award by the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education; and the 2018 American Education Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award for outstanding scholarship for A Black Woman’s Journey from Cotton Picking to College Professor: Lessons about race, gender, and class in America, a biography about her mother, Dr. Mildred Pratt. Her forthcoming book in 2024, Blackwildgirl: A Writer’s Journey to Take Back her Superpower, is a powerful and transformational autobiography of her life journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood in America.
A licensed attorney, she has five degrees, including a bachelor’s degree and master's degree from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree, a PhD, and a JD, from Vanderbilt. A writer, poet, public speaker, creative artist, scholar-activist, academic advocate, and a blogger, her life’s work reflects a commitment to helping others actualize their potential to serve humanity.
These two quotes define her: “No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”…No woman has ever written enough,” by bell hooks.
“Girl power in my mind is to let girls be exactly what they are. Let them be angry. Let them be resentful. And rebellious. Let them be hard and soft and loving and sad and silly. Let them be wrong. Let them be right. Let them be everything, because, they are everything,” by Amy Sherman-Palladino.
