Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a prominent figure in Critical Race Theory and a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School specializing in race and gender issues. She was born in Canton, Ohio in 1959. She received a B.A. from Cornell in 1981, a J.D. from Harvard Law in 1984, an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985, and has been a part of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law faculty since 1986. At Cornell, she was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. She has published works on civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law.