Menah Pratt

Menah Pratt, J.D., PhD., 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. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she held senior positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Vanderbilt University. She is the founder of the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy National Conference, now in its 11th year and hosted by Virginia Tech. Nationally recognized as a leader, scholar, and author of four books on issues of race, class, gender, culture, diversity, women’s leadership, education, and critical race feminism, Dr. Pratt was selected as the 2021 Inclusive Excellence Individual Leadership Award recipient by the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. Dr. Pratt was also awarded the 2018 American Education Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award for scholarship deemed to be outstanding in its field 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 genre-bending autobiography of her life journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood in America.   A writer, poet, public speaker, creative artist, scholar-activist, academic advocate, and blogger at www.menahpratt.com, her life’s work reflects a commitment to helping others actualize their potential to serve humanity.