EBONY MANifest Honors for Black Male Achievement featuring
Kierna Mayo, EBONY.com
Alexis McGill Johnson, American Values Institute.
Bio
Kierna Mayo
Kierna Mayo is the Editorial Director, Digital for EBONY.com. She is the former Editorial Director of Tyra.com, where she developed a cutting-edge, online
women’s magazine for Tyra Banks’ Bankable Enterprises. She is also former online editor at Cafemom.com. Kierna has written about culture and lifestyle for over 20 years. Her critically acclaimed writings have appeared in major national magazines including Essence, Marie Claire, Glamour, Seventeen, Vibe and Uptown among others. Most notably, Kierna is also the co-founder and founding Editor-in-Chief of Honey magazine. Recognized for its visionary editorial direction, Honey became the first of a new genre in American magazine publishing--a young, female demographic influenced by an emerging hip-hop culture.
Post Honey, Kierna developed a 1.0 Black girls’ web venture, LikePepper.com, and was later chosen to oversee the new direction of Essence Girl, a magazine supplement for millions of ‘tween and teen African American girls. From there she served as senior editor of Cosmogirl. During her tenure, she became a founding member of the Hearst Diversity Council, an executive body created to increase minority representation within the company.
In the earliest part of Kierna’s career she was an editor at The Source magazine where she covered the politics of hip-hop culture, and at City Limits magazine where she served on the development committee of NYC progressive policy think tank, Center for an Urban Future. Kierna’s work has been featured in several books including And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25
Years, and cited in numerous academic texts including The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation.
Kierna is a graduate of Hampton University with a BA in Mass Media Arts. She resides in New York City with her husband and two young sons, all of whom wear hoodies.
Alexis McGill Johnson
Alexis McGill Johnson is a thought leader and a bridge builder whose work spans politics, academia, social activism, and cultural strategies. Throughout her work, Alexis has explored the shifting paradigms of identity and race-based politics in the post-civil rights era, increasing civic engagement among youth and people of color, and the implications for demographic and ideological changes of these constituencies on national politics. Her career and philanthropy have always, at their core, focused on improving the lives of young people, with an emphasis on youth of color. She is a frequent commentator on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and in press.
Currently, Alexis is serving as the Executive Director of American Values Institute (AVI), a consortium of researchers, educators, and social justice advocates whose work analyzes the role of bias and racial anxiety in our society. AVI's goal is to develop and introduce a research-based, empirically supported set of interventions into today's racially polarized and fraught climate. Alexis is serves as Board member for Planned Parenthood Federation of America where she will assume the role of Chair this April.
Upon earning her undergraduate degree in Politics from Princeton, Alexis began her career in academia by enrolling in a doctoral program at Tale University. For six years, Alexis developed and taught several courses on race and urban development, power, poverty, and social movement theory at both Yale and Wesleyan Universities. Never satisfied with the insular boundaries of the Ivory Tower, however, Alexis searched continually for other venues and audiences to discuss the real life concerns and experiences of her generation. In March 2002, she found such an outlet in Savoy Magazine where she wrote an article about mobilizing the Hip Hop generation entitled: 'Can the Hip Hop Generation become the Next NRA?' An interview for that article with Russell Simmons, the legendary 'Godfather of Hip Hop,' created a unique opportunity to serve as Political Director of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network, Simmons's voter mobilization organization.
From July 2003 through the following year, she worked with Mr.Simmons and his national network of artists and cultural participants to devise the strategic plan for the HSAN. In July 2004, Alexis accepted an offer as Executive Director of Citizen Change, a nonprofit established by Sean Diddy Combs that educated young voters through grassroots and tailored social media efforts. During the 2004 election cycle, Alexis worked with Combs and his team at Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment on an unprecedented media and marketing campaign marked by the now ubiquitous slogan 'Vote or Die!' to educate, motivate, and empower young people about the process of voting. Mixing traditional grassroots mobilization with non-traditional consumer based marketing methodology created a new model for reaching young people and people of color that led to the most massive grassroots mobilization this generation had ever seen.
Since 2004, Alexis has remained a committed political activist and strategist for a variety of artists, organizations, and political candidates. That opportunity has allowed her to keep researching and testing various models of cultural engagement.
In addition to PPFA, Alexis also serves on the boards of Center for Social Inclusion, Air Traffic Control, and Citizen Engagement Lab, and is a Founder of The Culture Group. She previously served on the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
She and her husband, Rob Johnson, live in New York with their two daughters, Sara Jean (3) and Dylan Katherine (11 months).
