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  • Contributing Authors

Mikia Bright is a doctoral candidate at the University of Louisville’s Kent School of Social Work and a Southern Regional Education Board Fellow. She holds a master’s of arts in Pan-African Studies and a master’s of science in social work. Mikia’s research activity includes quantitative analyses of the social, economic, and political factors that impact growth in African American women’s state-incarceration rates.

Tyson H. Brown is an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University and is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at Meharry Medical College. His research interests include racial/ethnic and gender stratification, medical sociology, and population aging and health. His recent studies integrate life-course perspectives with intersectionality and critical race theories to understand the social stratification of wealth and health.

Linda Chatters is a professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, and professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She is also a faculty associate with the Program for Research on Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research and the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health. The focus of Dr. Chatters’s research is the study of adult development and aging in relation to the mental and physical health status and functioning of older persons in a variety of social contexts (that is, the family, church, and community). She is also interested in religious involvement among African Americans and the independent effects of religious, personal, and social status factors on personal well-being. Dr. Chatters is a fellow, Behavioral and Social Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America, and has been designated by Thomson-ISI as a Highly Cited Researcher in the Category of General Social Sciences. [End Page 224]

Taylor Hargrove is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at Vanderbilt University and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her research interests focus on racial/ethnic stratification, health disparities, social determinants of health, and stress.

Dana K. Harmon, PhD, MSW is an assistant professor of social work in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at The University of West Alabama. She specializes in research on African American men and family issues, spirituality and religiosity, parental loss, and social-work education and practice.

Ann Nguyen is a graduate student in the Joint Program in Social Work and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research interest is primarily in religiosity and its effects on mental health and subjective well-being in the Muslim population. Her work explores the effects of organizational religious involvement (for example, service attendance) and nonorganizational religious involvement (for example, praying individually) on stress, self-esteem, life satisfaction, distress, depressive symptoms, and other variables related to well-being and mental health. Further, her research examines the effects of mosque-based emotional support on mental health and subjective well-being and examines the stress-buffering effects of religiosity and the use of religious coping.

Armon R. Perry, PhD, MSW is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville’s Kent School of Social Work. His research interests include fathers’ involvement in the lives of their children and African American men’s role in family functioning. In addition to his research, he has professional experience in the areas of parent education and child protective services.

Tina Peterson is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at Western Kentucky University. Her primary teaching areas are in social welfare policy, social work practice with older adults, and research methods. Her research interests include aging, intergenerational caregiving in rural settings, and mental health disparities in later life. Her current research projects involve needs assessment of schools serving rural custodial grandparents in South Central Kentucky and a secondary analysis of health data from a university mobile health clinic.

Erin Ranft teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research and teaching interests include African American science fiction, particularly productions by feminist African American authors such as Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson. Additionally, Erin’s teaching and scholarly foci include American literature by women of color, women’s studies, and archival research related to the late...

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