ABOUT

 

K Fufkin Vollmayer is a 3rd generation San Franciscan. Journalism took her from Alaska to Washington, D.C. In 2012, when one of her kids came home from school parroting the same pioneer stories she’d grown up with, of boys in coonskin caps and girls in bonnets, she took history into her own hands. Or rather, her own research. Combing through the Lewis and Clark journals, she focused on the story of York, the Métis river guides, and the other enslaved member of the expedition, Sacaragawea. Fufkin Vollmayer attended UC Berkeley. She was a student of Michael P. Rogin, a political scientist who required students to read captivity and slave narratives for his American politics classes. In every Latin American country Fufkin has visited, she’s learned about enslaved and free peoples, maroon communities, and the Black African diaspora.