About the Interviewer

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy, DuPont, and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary films, including The Black Church (PBS), Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches (HBO), Gospel (PBS), and Great Migrations (PBS). Finding Your Roots, Gates’s groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, now in its eleventh season on PBS, was nominated for a Primetime Emmy (2024).  His latest book is The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Random House, 2024). He is at work on a new series exploring “The History of Blacks and Jews.”