Vershawn Young

Vershawn Ashanti Young, who goes by dr. vay, has been writing for newspapers and magazines for almost twenty years. He is a solo performance artist as well as a professor of communication, race, gender, literature, writing, and performance at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, including the forthcoming This Ain't Yesterday's Literacy: Culture and Education After George Floyd (Fountainhead Press, Jan. 2021), Other People’s English (Parlor Press, 2019), The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric (Routledge, 2018), and Neo-Passing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2018). dr. vay regularly tours his one man show "Your Average Nigga," titled after his book-length autobiographical study of Black idntity of of the same name. He is currently the chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest educational organization dedicated to college literacies of communication and writing.