Regina Mason is an international Speaker, Author, Executive Producer, and Storyteller who believes in the extraordinary will of the human spirit. Through the power of her story, she challenges audiences to recast painful chapters in America’s past in a light that empowers, inspires, and transforms our thinking.
She has spent 15 years researching the life and times of her great-great-greatgrandfather-pioneering fugitive slave autobiographer William Grimes. The seed for her search was unwittingly planted in a 5th-grade class assignment on “origins” and “ancestry” where she thought she did not have a history worth trumpeting. She has spent nearly a lifetime turning a negative into a positive that would one day culminate with a new edition of her ancestor’s book and, now, an acclaimed lm documentary.
Her essays have appeared in The Root, various blogs, and The Race Card Project. She, along with literary critic and expert, William L. Andrews, is co-editor of the authoritative 2008 Oxford University Press edition of Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. Regina has shared her amazing work with the general public, historical and genealogical societies, and a host of students on college and university campuses from Mans eld College, Oxford, England to Yale University in Connecticut to the University of California at Berkeley, and to Middle and High School students in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2018, she was Featured Speaker at RootsTech the largest family history conference in the world where, renowned Harvard scholar and host of Finding Your Roots, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. personally praised her talk after a thunderous standing ovation.
Regina has presented to educational organizations such as Words That Made America; corporate and professional organizations on diversity and equity and inclusion at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and American Cultures division at UC Berkeley. She helped organize the unprecedented 2015 University at Buffalo workshop where descendants of 19th century anti-slavery activists gathered to re ect, promote, and make relevant their ancestor’s voices.
Moreover, she has served as a panelist for the Reclaiming Our Ancestors lecture at the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center in New York City and has appeared on C-Span’s Book TV; RTE Radio of Ireland; NPR All Things Considered and Cross Currents. She was also a featured guest on the popular podcast series Presidents Are People Too by Audible an Amazon Company and has appeared on PBS Television and NPR’s award-winning Fresh Air with host Terry Gross. In addition to being an in-demand speaker, she also performs The Raw Truth a celebrated one-woman show and is Executive Producer of the award-winning feature documentary Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes. A native of California, Regina, a retiree from the University of California, Berkeley, resides in Oakland with her family. She is the recipient of the prestigious AMISTAD “Freedom” award by the state of Connecticut’s Amistad Committee, Incorporated.