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We are excited to announce the VRA 2021 virtualChicago keynote speaker Steven D. Booth, a Chicago-area archivist, researcher, and co-founder of the Blackivists. You can read more about his work in the biography below and on his website at http://www.stevendbooth.com/.

The online event will be live-streamed and open to the public. However, only registered conference attendees will be able to participate in the Q&A following the talk.

Save the date: March 24 at 11:00 am CDT. We hope you can join us for this keynote address!

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Steven De'Juan Booth (he/him) is an archivist, researcher, and co-founder of the Blackivists, a collective of trained Black memory workers who provide expertise on archiving and preservation practices to communities in the Chicagoland area. 

His work and research interests include born-digital audiovisual materials, Black cultural heritage preservation, community archives, and digital scholarship. Steve has worked for National Archives and Records Administration since 2009 and currently manages the audiovisual collection for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. He previously held positions at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and JPMorgan & Chase cataloging the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is actively involved in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and has served on the governing board of the organization. He has given talks at the Library of Congress, Bentley Historical Library, and Brown University's Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. 

From 2019-2020, Steven worked alongside Stacie Williams (the University of Chicago Libraries) as guest co-editor of Loss/Capture, an editorial project exploring the state of Black cultural archives in and beyond Chicago, presented by Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative. 

He is currently working on a book project with Barrye Brown (the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture) documenting the contributions and impact of African American archivists in SAA. He is also researching Black LGBTQIA spaces and newsletters published in the Midwest as sites and sources of knowledge production and sharing.  

He is part of a long lineage of Black information professionals who have matriculated from Morehouse College (BA in Music) and Simmons College (MS in Library Science).