Frank B. Wilderson, III is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Dr. Wilderson spent five-plus years (two months in 1989, two months in 1990, and five years: 1991-1996) in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress; a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe; a university lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand (a White English medium university in Johannesburg), Vista University (a Black English medium, Afrikaner controlled university in Soweto), and Khanya College (a tertiary-level liberation school for activist youth whose studies at been “interrupted” by the revolution); a Market Theater dramaturge where he worked on an all Black South African cast production of the Black American play The Colored Museum; and as an elected official in the (ANC-aligned) Congress of South African Writers.

His film Reparations…Now is a critical documentary that captures the terror of unnamable loss imposed upon Blacks by the legacy of slavery. His work in digital film, literature, and cultural theory cross-pollinate each other in with two ontological points: (1) that accumulation and fungibility, as opposed to work, are the constituent elements of slavery and (2) that Black accumulation and fungibility is contemporary and essential to civic life.

Dr. Wilderson holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College in European Philosophy and Comparative Government; an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University; an MA and Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department, Film Studies Program at UC Berkeley. His fiction and creative prose, as well as his critical and scholarly work, have been published in South African, French, United Kingdom, and American journals.

He has received numerous writing awards, including The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, The Crothers Short Story Award, The Judith Stronach Award for Poetry, The Jerome Foundation Artists and Writers Award, The Loft-McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota, and The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America. He has two forthcoming works: a political memoir, Incognegro (South End Press 2008); a cinema and political ontology study, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press 2009). Ishmael Reed calls Wilderson’s work “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].”