LaKisha Michelle Simmons is an Associate Professor of History & Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently working on a book called Labor, Love & Loss: Black Women, their Children and the Ancestors. As an interdisciplinary, feminist historian, her research and teaching focuses on Black girls’ studies, Black motherhood, African American gender history, southern history, and the history of the body.

She is the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (UNC Press, 2015), which won the SAWH Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in southern women's history and received Honorable Mention for the ABWH Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for the best book in African American women's history. Simmons has published articles in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture, Gender & History, American Quarterly, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. She has also contributed to edited collections such as The Lemonade Reader and Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans.

Simmons is also the co-organizer and co-creator (with Corinne Field) of the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference, which first convened at the University of Virginia in 2017. Professor Field and Simmons co-edited a special issue on Black girls and kinship for the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and they are finishing co-editing the anthology The Global History of Black Girlhood, published by the University of Illinois Press.