
Sikivu Hutchinson, Ph.D. is a Los Angeles-based educator, author, playwright, director and musician. She is a recipient of the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year award and received her doctorate from New York University. Her books include Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020), Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003), Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011), and the novel White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), on Peoples Temple and the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Since 2022, she has taught an annual spring semester course on African American Humanism at Pitzer College.
She also wrote, directed and produced a short film and play of White Nights, Black Paradise and was awarded a “Humanities For All” grant from the California Humanities Foundation in 2019. Her short plays Grinning Skull and the speculative fiction piece Narcolepsy, Inc were featured in the Robey Theatre’s 2017 Paul Robeson Festival and the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Her articles have been published in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, The Humanist Magazine and the L.A. Times. She is also the founder of Black Skeptics Los Angeles and the Women’s Leadership Project, a Black feminist mentoring program for girls of color in South L.A. Her novel, Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe, was published in March 2021. Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2023 drama awards and her speculative fiction short story collection, The Roar of Distant Engines was published in 2023. Sikivu has also produced five original folk/rock/country genre singles as a guitarist-singer-songwriter.
