Mikki Kendall Books in Order

Mikki Kendall was born and raised in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighborhood, and the city remains central to the questions she writes about. Her work moves between history, politics, pop culture, food, race, and feminism, always with an eye on whose everyday lives get overlooked.

Her route to publishing wasn't direct. She finished high school at 16, joined the military, and later began college as an adult student at Parkland College before transferring to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She earned a history degree in 2005, first imagining it as preparation for law school.

A course in African American history changed how she thought about the subject. History stopped being a list of dates and became a set of stories that could explain the present. A class on Black feminism also gave language to concerns she had long felt but rarely saw addressed.

After graduation, Kendall chose not to go to law school. She worked in government offices, including the IRS and Department of Veterans Affairs, while writing on the side, and later earned a master's degree in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University. Those jobs, and her own experience as a veteran and parent, kept practical questions close to the surface.

In 2013, her hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen helped bring her writing to a much wider audience.

The conversation behind the hashtag challenged a version of mainstream feminism that could talk about equality while sidelining women of color. Kendall's essays and talks return to that gap, as well as media representation, poverty, reproductive rights, food politics, technology, and public safety. She has written for major publications and spoken at universities and on broadcast programs.

Her 2019 graphic history Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists, illustrated by A. D'Amico, traces women's struggles for rights across centuries and around the world. It connects well-known and less-familiar figures to movements for abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQ liberation. Readers looking for a visual way into the subject will find it broad in scope but rooted in people and movements. The following year, Hood Feminism turned a sharper focus on the blind spots of mainstream feminism.

In Hood Feminism, Kendall argues that access to food, housing, medical care, good schools, safe neighborhoods, and a living wage cannot be treated as side issues. The book brings personal experience together with history, policy, and cultural criticism, asking who gets included when a movement says it speaks for all women. It became a New York Times bestseller and received a Chicago Review of Books Award.

Her through line is simple: ideas about justice have to hold up in ordinary life.

Kendall continues to write and speak from Chicago, where she lives with her family. She also works in comics, including co-writing The Uncanny X-Men with Gail Simone. Across forms, she favors hard questions, usable history, and a direct conversation with the reader.