april l. graham-jackson, PhD is a proud third-generation Black Chicagolander and former music journalist whose research explores how geographic development, racial capitalism, sub\urban migration, and music and sound shape Black identity in the Chicago Metropolitan Area known colloquially as Chicagoland. Her work broadens the geographic, migrational, and generational scope of Black American life beyond “the urban” by examining the placemaking practices and spatial imaginaries of Black people who developed Black sub\urban cities, villages, and neighborhoods in the South Suburbs of Chicago in the post-Reconstruction and post-Civil Rights eras. april documents the geography of intraracial relations within Black American communities and how Black people express feelings of belonging, strangeness, and a Black sense of place across urban-regional landscapes. Dr. graham-jackson has published in The Professional Geographer, Music and Science, and the Journal of Urban Affairs. She is the founder of the Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference and Chair of the Black Geosonicologies Research Group.

april is also developing her undergraduate honors thesis: Still Sweatin’...Mapping House and Black Bodies: Place-Making in the Black House Music and Cultural Community of Chicago into a manuscript. Her thesis examined the placemaking practices of the Black house community in Chicago and the ways they exerted their social, cultural, and geographic power and (re)claimed space | place in Chicago through the formation of house music, house culture, and what she termed, “house geographies.” Before returning to academia, she worked as the Executive Editor of the popular hip hop blog KevinNottingham.com and as a freelance writer for the Chicago Defender, Hip Hop DX, Soul Train, and other multi-media outlets. She has interviewed Aretha Franklin, Common, Outkast, Chaka Khan, Bob James, and many other artists.

Dr. graham-jackson is a Department of Sociology Postdoctoral Scholar and Mansueto Institute Fellow at the University of Chicago. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate with Chicago Studies, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, and the Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago. april graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College as the first person with a bachelor’s degree in Black Geographies and from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in Geography. She is also rooting for everybody Black, especially Black women, Black LGBTQIA+ folks, the Black house kids, Black Chicagolanders, Black weirdos, and every Black person navigating anxiety and depression. You can find april musing at BlackChicagoland.com.