Ashanté M. Reese is a member of Civil Eats' Advisory Board. She is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces.
Animated by the question, who and what survives, Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of antiblackness and food access.