Dr. Chamara (Sh’Mar’Rah) Jewel Kwakye (Kwaa’Chee) is an award-winning artist, scholar-educator with interdisciplinary interests at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnography, performance, and pedagogy. She is a first-generation college student whose love for learning, community, and Black studies pushed her to complete a Bachelors in Ethnic Studies and Sociology, a Masters in Post-Secondary Administration and Student Affairs, and PhD in Education Policy Studies with concentrations in African American & African Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies. She is an Assistant Professor and one of the Department of African American & African Studies at MSU two most fly, award-winning advisors and (like Dr. Morris) she wholeheartedly believes that students should graduate with their spirits intact. Her approach to recruitment, retention, and advising is to encourage students to dream about the life they want in the short term and long term (not the jobs or things they’ve been told they should want) and to work with them to make those things tangible and their dreams come true. She is excited about working closely on CAL recruitment and looks forward to enticing students to be a part of CAL and showing them that an Arts & Letters Degree can help them ask and answer questions that will change our world for the better. She has published works on qualitative methods, hip-hop feminist pedagogy, Black girlhood, and co-edited, Wish to Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader. She’s co-written, starred in, and produced several ethnographic performances based on the lives of Black women and girls. She is the past recipient of the University of California, Riverside Gluck Fellowship, the University of Illinois Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the AERA Mentorship award, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Radical Art for Social Change Award. She is currently working on her newest book project Cimmaron, which explores Black Girlhood and the African Diaspora. When she’s not teaching, researching, or directly engaging students you can find her making something tasty and sharing it with her family and friends and looking for a new body of water to visit.