Melissa Harris-Perry Biography

Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry (born October 2, 1973; formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell) is an American author, political scientist, television host and liberal political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosts the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC. She is also a regular fill in host on The Rachel Maddow Show, also on MSNBC.

She is a professor of political science at Tulane University. Prior to that, she was an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University from 2006 to 2010 and taught political science at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2005.

Life and career

Melissa Victoria Harris was born in Seattle and grew up in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Chester, where she attended Thomas Dale High School. She is the youngest of five children. Her black father, William M. Harris Sr., was dean of Afro-American affairs at the University of Virginia, and her white mother, Diana Gray, taught at a community college and worked for nonprofits that helped poor communities. Her mother was raised in a Mormon working-class family in a racially homogeneous neighborhood and went to college at Brigham Young University. After a failed first marriage, her mother left the LDS Church and was a single mother before she met Melissa's father. "I've never thought of myself as biracial," Harris-Perry says. "I'm black." Harris-Perry's family later became Unitarian Universalists.

She received a bachelor of arts in English from Wake Forest University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University in 1999. She also received an honorary doctorate from Meadville Lombard Theological School. Motivated to better understand the role of the black church in political movements, she was a Master of Divinity student at Union Theological Seminary of New York City. Harris-Perry considers her Wake Forest mentor, Maya Angelou, to be her most important inspiration for becoming a professor. "As her student I watched as she influenced public discourse, taught students, and shared ideas in a way that seemed to truly matter for people's lives."

Harris-Perry is the author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought on the methods African Americans use to develop political ideas through ordinary conversations in places like barbershops, churches, and popular culture. The work won the 2005 W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2005 Best Book Award from the Race and Ethnic Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her interests include the study of African-American political thought, black religious ideas and practice, and social and clinical psychology. Harris-Perry is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. In 2009, she was the key note speaker for the Unitarian Universalist Association on "Faith and Reason: Race, Justice, and American Political Life".

Harris-Perry was Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University from 2006 to 2010, leaving after being denied a full professorship due to such factors as her lack of scholarly work. Currently she is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University.

She was married to Dennis Lacewell from 1999 to 2005, with whom she has a daughter. She currently lives in New Orleans and is married to James Perry, who was a 2010 candidate for mayor in New Orleans. In 2012, two days after the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Harris-Perry tweeted that the abandoned home in the 7th ward that she and her husband had bought and were restoring was destroyed during Hurricane Isaac.

MSNBC announced on January 5, 2012 that Harris-Perry would host her own weekend show, which began airing on February 18, 2012 at 10 a.m. EST. The eponymous show follows Up with Steve Kornacki and leads into Weekends with Alex Witt. According to The New York Times, Perry's schedule of commuting from New Orleans to New York City for each broadcast will be similar to, but less frequent than, fellow MSNBC personality Lawrence O'Donnell's weekly commute from Los Angeles to New York City for daily broadcasts of The Last Word.

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