Maegan Parker Brooks earned her PhD in Communication Arts, Rhetoric with an emphasis in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After teaching at the University of Puget Sound for the last four years, Brooks relocated to the Denver area where she is busy writing and childrearing. Her writing projects focus on the rhetoric of social change, with particular emphases on the roles gender, race, class, and sexuality play in amplifying/silencing voices in the public sphere. Brooks’ scholarship has appeared in a variety of journals including, most recently, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Voices of Democracy, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Women’s Studies in Communication. She also contributed to the newly released Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture. Her co-edited (with Davis W. Houck) anthology, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2010 and she is presently pitching her next book, A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement. What’s more, she has been invited to pen a chapter for the forthcoming volume of A Rhetorical History of the United States. In addition to her writing projects, Brooks is committed to working with and for the communities she studies. She is on the board of the national Fannie Lou Hamer Statue and Education Fund committee and serves as the chief social media fundraiser for the group.