Meet Gwendolyn Wallace — a storyteller, historian, and scholar whose children’s books invite young people to imagine new possibilities and center joy, community, and care.

ABOUT GWENDOLYN

Gwendolyn Wallace is an award-winning children’s literature author and multidisciplinary historian reimagining public scholarship. She is currently a PhD student at MIT in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, & Society (HASTS), studying the relationship between race, science, and the environment. She is the author of three picture books: The Light She Feels Inside (2023), Joy Takes Root (2023), and Dancing With Water (2025). Imagine New Suns, Gwendolyn’s fourth book and the first picture book biography of science fiction author Octavia Butler, is forthcoming in 2026.

At MIT, Gwendolyn received the prestigious Presidential Fellowship in 2024 and will be the 2026-2027 L. Dennis Shapiro (1955) graduate fellow in the History of African American Experience of Technology. Alongside her PhD, she works as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of African American History (MAAH) in Boston and Nantucket. Gwendolyn’s writing for adults has been published in Publishers Weekly, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, the Center for Research Architecture, and more. As of 2025, Gwendolyn is a reader for Callaloo, the premier journal of literature, art, and culture of the African Diaspora. Additionally, she is on the board of The REACH Fund of Connecticut (Reproductive Equity, Access & CHoice), a reproductive justice advocacy organization and Connecticut’s first abortion fund.

An alumna of Phillips Exeter Academy, Gwendolyn graduated from Yale University in 2021 with a B.A. in the history of science and medicine, where she received the Lily Rosen Prize in Women’s Health. She was also the winner of the 2021 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award from Meridians, a peer-reviewed, feminist, interdisciplinary journal based at Smith College. In 2021, Gwendolyn was chosen as the first fellow of the International African American Museum before pursuing a master’s degree in public history at University College London in 2022. She can usually be found gardening, exploring used bookstores, or listening to the liberatory impulses of young children. She is based in Boston.