Frank Leon Roberts is a public intellectual and award-winning community organizer. At 26 years old, he is a Ford Foundation Fellow and former Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University (Spring 2009). He holds the distinction of being one of only 35 doctoral candidates in the United States to receive the 2009 Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the nation’s premiere scholarly appointment for minority students at the Ph.D. level. A vibrant cultural commentator, he has been a contributor to The Huffington Post, The Village Voice, The Daily Voice and The San Francisco Chronicle. He received his B.A. in English and American Literature and African American Studies from The Gallatin School at NYU, where he founded the LGBT Students of Color Organization, served as Editor-in-Chief of NYU’s vibrant undergraduate journal Brownstone, and was an active member of the Dean’s Honor Society. He received NYU’s “Man of the Year” Award from the university’s Organization of Black Women (OBW) in 2004. He holds a master’s degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is nearing the completion of his doctorate. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Emory University where he is a Short-Term Research Fellow in the Manuscripts, Archive, and Rare Book Library.

Outside of his career in the Ivory Tower, Frank has led the “younger than thirty generation” of experts specializing in political issues related to the Global AIDS epidemic in its historical, racial, and gendered contexts. Within this area, he has a long history of community organizing efforts among multi-disenfranchised minorities (such as incarcerated black men and women, GLBT populations, and poor and working class people). Accordingly, he has held posts as a Public Policy Fellow at the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and in community based organizations such as the People of Color in Crisis (POCC) and GMHC. He is also the former special assistant to the legendary attorney Johnnie Cochran (deceased), whom he worked for during the time Cochran helped cultivate the national legal movement for African American reparations.

Frank is the co-editor of If We Have To Take Tomorrow, a community-based book anthology published jointly by AIDS Project Los Angeles and the Institute for Gay Men’s Health (2006). He also co-founded the National Black Justice Coalition (a Civil Rights & Social Justice organization based in Washington, D.C.) in 2003.

Equally poised as a careful scholar, an impassioned social justice activist, and an experienced community organizer, Frank’s personal and political life is inspired by a quote from philosopher Cornel West: “Justice is what Love looks like in public.”