Savala Nolan is the author of Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body. She and her writing have been featured in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, Time, NPR, Forbes and more. She is a regular keynote speaker and panelist on social justice issues including implicit bias, structural racism, understanding Whiteness, and the importance of social justice work for all lawyers. She is part of the team behind the Peabody Award-winning podcast The Promise. Her second essay collection, Good Woman, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Savala Nolan joined the Henderson Center in January 2016, where she leads over 50 lectures, symposia, teach-ins, and skills-building workshops a year for law students, scholars, and activists. She spearheaded the creation of a Race and Law concentration, successfully endowed a new racial justice fellowship, and works closely with affinity groups and law journals to prepare students for a thriving social justice practice.
Prior to joining the Henderson Center, Nolan was Associate Director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University’s Law School in Detroit, Michigan. She practiced law at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP (then Keker & Van Nest) in San Francisco. Nolan also clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and, in 2010, served as a law clerk in the Obama Administration’s Office of White House Counsel, where she prepared research memoranda on constitutional matters. Before law school, Nolan worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.
