Time to write, think, and be in intellectual community.

Overwhelmed by the proverbial exclaim: "I just wish I had time to write," Chalk & Pen was founded by Dr. Michele E. Watkins, a postmodern womanist systematic theologian, theological educator, former pastor and community organizer whose vocations have long centered Black intellectual life, religious thought, spiritual formation, and social justice. She is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Her scholarship engages questions around salvation and deification in the Black and Womanist, patristic, and Orthodox traditions.

As founder and director, Dr. Watkins brings to Black Commune Chalk & Pen the experience of a scholar who knows the demands of academic writing from the inside. She is the author of Deification of the Desacralized: Critical Correlations Among Womanist & Orthodox Theologies, under review with Fordham University Press, coauthor of Unmasking Racism with Abingdon Press, and author of several articles and chapters. Her academic career has included appointments at St. John’s University, the University of San Diego, and Iliff School of Theology.

As a scholar with experience in leadership development, scholarly programming, and the "art of convening," Dr. Watkins directs Commune with strategic vision and collaborative leadership that curates spaces where Black scholars in theology and religion can write with discipline, think with freedom, receive serious intellectual companionship, attend to vocation and spirit, and resist the isolation that too often marks black academic life.