Ashley J. May is an anthropologist, vintage book collector, and community archivist born and raised in the settler/enslaver landscape of Los Angeles, CA - the unceded territory of the Tongva people.
As a scholar, Ashley’s work emerges at the confluence of historical anthropology, intellectual geography, and the Black Red Sea. Ashley's methodological preoccupations attend to embodied, material, and visual archives as currents through which new forms of Black life flow in the wake of ongoing catastrophe.
As a community organizer, Ashley finds joy in curating collections of books authored by Black writers and illustrators she found in the stacks of her grandparents’ home libraries. She gathers with Black children and their kin in the urban forests of South Central Los Angeles to heal, to tell stories, and to imagine new worlds together. Together with her collaborator, Jessica Lewis Stevens, she archives these experiments in community grounded, collaborative ethnography through a three-volume zine and oral history project titled Thirty Sunsets and a Moon.