Winner
American Academy of Religion
2023 Martin E. Marty Award
for the Public Understanding
of Religion

SCHOLAR • WRITER • WOMANIST THEOLOGIAN

Dr. Pierce currently serves as Professor and Dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN. Her research specialties include Literature & Religion; Womanist Theology; and African American Religions. She is the author of In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith and the stories We Inherit, and Hell Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative.

Meet Dr. Pierce

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Meditations Of The Heart

In My Grandmother’s House

Hell Without Fires

“THERE are no voiceless people. THERE are no voiceless communities. THERE is simply an unwillingness to allow others to speak. THERE is simply an unwillingness to hear the pain and the critique of those who have been marginalized and silenced.
In KEEPING with the best of WOMANIST PRACTICES, how can you be a megaphone for the disinherited?”

— Dr. Yolanda Pierce