Jennifer Baszile was born in southern California in 1969 and spent the bulk of her youth living on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.  The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir is the candid and deeply personal story of her California girlhood lived in the midst of tremendous change: integration. As a member of the first generation of Americans born after the end of legal segregation, Baszile and her contemporaries spent their childhoods fulfilling the nation’s promise of equality. But along the way, Baszile lived in the painful space between hope and reality, where no one, not even adults knew what to expect. Touchstone Books, the Simon and Schuster imprint, will publish The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir in January 2009. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University. and a doctorate in history from Princeton.  From 1999 until 2007, Jennifer was an assistant professor of history, American and African American studies at Yale University. She was the first black woman to teach history at Yale and has written scholarly essays, papers, articles, and reviews.  Jennifer has appeared on public radio and television.  

Jennifer has received many awards and fellowships. In graduate school, she won the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. Jennifer has also received the Columbia College Women Alumnae Achievement Award, the Yale College Poorvu Award for Outstanding Teaching. The Mixed Magic Theater presented her with their 2008 Strength Award. Jennifer has already been nationally recognized as a leading voice of her generation and was named one of Ebony Magazine’s “Thirty Leaders of the Future.”