Kofi-Charu Nat Turner Author

Kofi-Charu Nat Turner, grandson of Caffie Greene, is an associate professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Brought up by activist parents in the San Francisco Bay Area and then by his grandma in South Central L.A., Dr. Turner first found a spiritual foundation to his activism as a student of Africana Studies studying abroad in Ghana. Today, all his work seeks to engage and support historically underserved youth, K-12 teachers, and administrators utilizing mindfulness and other embodied practices to heal the intergenerational trauma associated with white body supremacy. A community-engaged scholar and ceaseless seeker of knowledge, Dr. Turner’s research and courses span the areas of language and literacy practices of culturally and linguistically diverse urban adolescents (particularly African Americans) in school and nonschool settings, racial justice/reparations in education, hip-hop culture, and emergent technologies. He received degrees from Harvard and Brown Universities and was trained in dynamic mindfulness (DMind) at the Niroga Institute (Oakland, CA), an organization he continues to collaborate with, facilitating DMind with youth in Jersey City public schools.